Case Study: Royal Ontario Museum improves virtual exhibition access with ThingLink

ROM’s Interactive and Responsive Virtual Museum Tours Solve Access Issues

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) needed to provide a true virtual tour experience for its online school programs, as audiences were disappointed with its previous webinar format. The challenge was to meet these high expectations for an immersive walkthrough while addressing accessibility barriers and the logistical difficulties of physical school trips. They turned to the vendor ThingLink for a solution using its virtual tour platform.

ThingLink enabled ROM to create an interactive and web-based virtual tour of its Great Whales exhibition. This solution allowed the museum's internal team to easily build and update rich, accessible content without requiring users to download an app. The results were significant, with 461 classes (nearly 14,000 students) signing up in the first month, a number far exceeding the capacity of in-person visits. The ThingLink tour successfully fulfilled the museum's mandate to provide province-wide access and became their new education tool of choice for future exhibitions.

Royal Ontario Museum

Julie Tomé

Bilingual Teacher