Seven UK organisations across culture, entertainment and education have announced a partnership that will see them collaborate on reimagining the way museum exhibits unfold using storytelling and virtual technology.

The newly-created consortium is led by creative content studio Factory 42 and includes the London’s the Almeida Theatre, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, as well as the University of Exeter in south-western England.

Using tech from US spatial computing company Magic Leap, The Almeida and Factory 42 will create an immersive theatre that opens up two separate adventure game visitor experiences that explore multi-sensory and interactive worlds at the museums, aiming to provide visitors with interactive encounters with everything from robots to dinosaurs.

Rooms at both the Natural History Museum and Science Museum will allow visitors to play detectives roles and meet and interact with various digitally developed characters, including androids and AI beings, as well as velociraptors and fossils.

Visitors to the Natural History Museum and Science Museum experiences will be immersed within the narrative and thus able to react to the characters and create their own stories. Smaller versions of the experiences will also be available at a number of Intu shopping centres around the UK.

Dinosaurs from the collection at the Natural History Museum will be brought to life and visitors will play palaeontologist, indulging in scientific discovery. Visitors to the Science Museum, meanwhile, will take part in a mixed-reality detective experience, featuring high-resolution 3D scans of robots and other objects from its collection.

“For millions of visitors each year a visit to the Natural History Museum or Science Museum is not complete without an encounter with robots or dinosaurs,” said John Cassy, Factory 42 CEO.

“Thanks to the magic of technology and the minds of some brilliant technologists, creatives and scientists, audiences will soon be able to see, smell, hear and touch robots and dinosaurs as part of a group of family or friends.”

Director and group executive of the Science Museum Group Sir Ian Blatchford added: “We tell stories of world-changing innovations.

“Through this collaboration with our creative partners, we will be able to build new immersive worlds, where robots and automata can be experienced like never before, where people can engage with science and engineering in new and exciting ways, and where our audiences can glimpse the future of storytelling.”

The visitor experiences are expected to open to the public in Q2/Q3 2020. The project is majority funded by a grant from UK Research and Innovation with additional funding coming from Magic Leap and UK entertainment group Sky.

Almeida Theatre artistic director Rupert Goold said: “At the Almeida, we interrogate the present, dig up the past and imagine the future so we’re delighted to be joining forces with some of the most prestigious cultural institutions on a project that will use cutting-edge technology to offer a new form of storytelling.”