Screenshot of the Virtual Steelpan Museum landing page on Spatial. On August 11, 2023, the inaugural World Steelpan Day, the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago was honoured around the globe as a builder of communities and a driver of cultural, social and economic development — but on that day, the impact of the steelpan also entered the virtual space with the launch of the Virtual Steelpan Museum. L-R: Deidre Lee Kin and Shawn De Freitas, co-founders of Dingolé Limited, which created the Virtual Steelpan Museum, at the live demo at Mille Fleurs in Port of Spain, Trinidad, August 16, 2023. Photo by Janine Mendes-Franco, used with permission. Less than a week later, on August 16, Shawn De Freitas, co-founder of Dingolé Limited, the Trinidad-based digital agency that created the museum, conducted an up-close and personal demonstration of the virtual reality tech at Mille Fleurs, a heritage building bordering the Queen's Park Savannah in Port of Spain, which I attended. To De Freitas, the creation of the museum was all about “putting our stories in that virtual space.” The idea first came to him while he was attending an augmented reality conference in California; it struck him that the technology “would work perfectly for pan.” Out of that idea emerged Pan Jam, a virtual reality music learning app that reimagined music learning for seniors in order to support healthy ageing and wellbeing. “The very first iteration of the museum was a feature in that app to onboard new users and introduce them to the steelpan instrument,” De Freitas explains. “We observed that users were spending a lot more time that we expected in the museum, so we decided to expand it and add more content.” The first independent release of the museum happened at Carifesta, a biannual regional arts festival last hosted in Trinidad and Tobago in 2019. Its success at that event confirmed for De Freitas that the museum could stand alone, so he and his team began development of the Virtual Steelpan Museum, which went through a few unreleased iterations prior to its eventual launch on World Steelpan Day. This final version, De Freitas says, “was driven by universal access and adopted Web 3.0 technologies that allow users to experience it on mobile, desktop and VR.” De Freitas remains convinced of the importance of the project because while the steelpan has enjoyed a wide international reach, there are still pockets of people who don't know about the instrument. A believer in meeting people where they are, he also saw its usefulness as a tool for youth to consume more easily information about their national instrument. The medium allowed the platform to scale globally very quickly. It was therefore important to get things right. Part of the challenge with how the steelpan came into being is that it was a community effort, and a lot of the origin stories have been told through oral tradition. The tech team collaborated with journalist Kim Johnson, who has done a lot of research on the steelband movement and written books on the subject, to help ensure that they got things like the developmental timeline as accurate as possible. Screenshot of the author's avatar checking out the timeline of Trinidad and Tobago's steelband movement. The designers have been very careful about what they put out on the platform; all information that is shared is properly researched and supported with links to reliable sources. “Pan [has] a million stories, sometimes contradictory,” De Freitas explained. “Editorial decisions were hard to make, considering that there have been so many contributors to the movement.” As far as building the space was concerned, the challenge was that it was 3D and had to be able to be navigated. The team suddenly found themselves having to understand elements outside of their skill set, like architecture, and how people walk through a space. They needed to be sensitive to textures and material, and understand how best to curate the space for a cohesive experience. As such, they worked with designers and coders, building the virtual museum almost like a sculpture, in an iterative way, paying attention to everything from aesthetics to narrative. De Freitas is very proud of the accessibility of the space, since users don't have to have virtual reality (VR) sets in order to enjoy it. The site is also quite interactive: “It’s not passive press and play.” Given that the steelpan is such an integral part of Trinidad and Tobago's annual Carnival celebrations, the virtual museum space wanted to integrate both the street festival and its music (calypso and soca) into the experience. Screenshots of four of the key galleries in the Virtual Steelpan Museum.