This mini exhibition must be felt and listened to. It consists of historical and contemporary means of communication used by people with blindness and impaired vision. Unheard of for a museum exhibition, you are allowed to touch the objects. In 2022, a VR-experience has been added to the exhibition, which shows, how it is to live with eye diseases, color blindness and visual disorders. You can now try to be colorblind or hallucinate yourself, and you can learn more about how the eye works in a new VR-movie, called “The eye that sees”.

Important sensory organ
85 percent of our sensory input comes from our eyes, and your eyes can treat more than 36.000 pieces of information per hour. But these visual impressions can be altered by diseases and other conditions in the eye such as glaucoma and color blindness.

VR stimulates the senses
VR can activate senses and emotions in a way completely different from other medias, and we wanted to make use of that here. Our wish was to make a movie, which allowed the audience to see the world through the eyes of others and feel on their own body what a visual impairment is. The movie shows the audience different visual impressions – hopefully, one leaves with a fascination of how fantastic the eye is and a better understanding of people with a visual impairment.

Press contact
Julie W. Tovgaard, Digital curator
julie.tovgaard@sund.ku.dk
+45 51 89 52 58

The collection on the history of blindness illuminates the cultural and sociohistorical development of social welfare for blind and visually impaired in Denmark, from the age of philanthropy in the beginning of the 19th century and until the all-embracing welfare state in the end of the twentieth century.

The collection contains a large amount of objects, pictures and books in both Braille and relief and moon type. The collection must be considered one of the most well registered collections on the history of blindness in the world; and it is – without comparison – the most accessible.

In July 2021, Medical Museion was chosen to take part in a project called Digitraining. Medical Museion was chosen as one of three museums to receive training, coaching and, in the end, compose a VR experience.

The VR experience was developed in collaboration with the Danish company Khora, a Copenhagen-based studio producing virtual and augmented reality.

The project “Digitraining” is a course and education for chosen museum employees in Europe, who works with digital communication.

The movie is produced by Khora in collaboration with Medical Museion. The movie is supported by Creative Europe. Thank you for professional sparring to Øjenforeningen, by oculist and chairperson Carsten Edmund as well as director Marijke Vittrup.