Case study Musée d'Orsay
Committed to actively reducing their environmental impact, the Musée d'Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie commissioned SE Advisory Services to assess the carbon footprint of their immersive virtual reality experience, “Tonight with the Impressionists, Paris 1874.” This 45-minute virtual exhibit, a co-production with Excurio and GEDEON Expériences, offered a unique immersion into 19th-century Paris and the Impressionist art movement.
The new virtual exhibition format offered a new and innovative way for the museum to provide access to art through future virtual exhibitions. The temporary immersive exhibit attracted over 80,000 visitors between March – August 2024. As Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie considered future virtual exhibitions, the museum looked to better understand the environmental impact of the virtual exhibit to ensure that they could proactively manage the carbon footprint and environmental impact of future events.
As a first exercise, the museum focused on assessing the associated greenhouse gas emissions and calculating the virtual exhibition’s carbon footprint. The aim was to provide insight into the current carbon emission footprint and define best practice to minimise the carbon impact of future exhibits. This limited scope facilitated the coordination of data collection from 3 producing entities, in order to produce the most accurate and detailed carbon footprint assessment possible.
Since 2010, the Musée d'Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie collections have showcased the artistic creation of the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, a fruitful period that saw the birth of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements. The Musée l'Orangerie houses Claude Monet's last masterpiece, the Water Lilies, as well as the Walter-Guillaume collection, one of the finest European collections of paintings from the 1860s to the 1930s.
“The Musée d’Orsay and Musée l’Orangerie are committed to an ambitious decarbonization trajectory. Calculating the carbon footprint of this virtual reality exhibition raises awareness, both internally and externally about the challenges of sustainable digital development, the levers for action and reflection that enable projects to be approached with ecological issues in mind.”
SE Advisory Services carried out a carbon footprint assessment of the immersive exhibition and organised a consultation with the event’s co-producers (Excurio and GEDEON Expériences) to formulate recommendations for the Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie. The intention was to integrate the recommendations into the museum’s decarbonization plan, disseminating best practice to implement into the design of future virtual exhibition experiences.
This pioneering assessment utilized CEPIR’s (Case Study for Responsible Immersive) Extended Reality (XR) environmental impact assessment tool. Developed with support from the French government, this XR tool is designed to evaluate the environmental impacts associated with virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies.
The CEPIR project aims to generate data and tools for assessing the environmental impacts of the French XR sector. Its goals include issuing recommendations to public policy stakeholders and industry professionals to align the sector with an ambitious benchmark trajectory by 2030. This trajectory will be commensurate with the challenges of decarbonization and will consider the risks associated with raw material supply.
By employing this tool in our assessment, the results of this study can be compared with future carbon footprinting assessments of similar virtual projects. This comparison enhances the potential for collaboration among virtual reality stakeholders in the industry.
Furthermore, this study will contribute to the implementation of the Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie’s 2030 decarbonization plan, which was designed by SE Advisory Services and supported by Les Augures.
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Carbon Footprinting