For a team spread between Bangkok and Helsinki with no shared technical baseline, being able to work in a browser mattered more than any single feature.
How a Thai research team turned a buried archive into a walkable exhibition
Historical records that nobody could navigate, rebuilt as a space visitors explore instead of search.
THE CHALLENGE
An archive nobody could access
The collective is a research team of six to fifteen people working on projects funded by the National Research Council of Thailand. The team is based in Bangkok; Tana Vipavin, who led the exhibition work, is based in Helsinki. The audiences they answer to are three at once: institutional stakeholders, the Thai public, and a global readership.
The historical records at the centre of the work were already digitised and already online. That was also the problem. Sitting in a digital repository, they were buried; technically available, practically unreachable. A static catalogue website had been the obvious answer and was not an engaging one: it could list what existed without ever making anyone want to look.
What the material needed was narration. In the summer of 2023, alongside an onsite exhibition, the team went looking for a way to visualise the archive interactively rather than index it.
THE SOLUTION
The platform that met all non-negotiables
The team wrote its criteria before it went shopping, which is unusual and made the decision fast. The platform had to be cloud-based. It had to have a low enough technical barrier for a distributed team with mixed technical skills. It had to work on desktop and mobile, because the Thai public would arrive on phones. Support had to be responsive. Templates had to exist, so the first build did not start from nothing. And the price had to be competitive.
Metasteps met all of them. And then some more.
Two additional objections had to be dealt with. No institution in the country had used the platform before, which for publicly funded work is a real risk. Also, tthe team wanted the space to have a very specific feeling; this was resolved by uploading their own decorative items, which turned a constraint into a design decision.
The team did not wait to be fluent; the first exhibition was built while still learning the tool and the upgrade to advanced features came later, once the shape of the work was clear. For a research group with a funded timeline, that order matters: the platform avoided an extended training phase before it added output.
THE RESULT
An archive that reads as an exhibition
The records now sit inside a space visitors move through, with the narrative doing the work a catalogue could never do. The same build serves institutional stakeholders reviewing funded output, the Thai public arriving on a phone, and international audiences who would never have found the repository.
The team's own capability moved as well. A distributed group with mixed technical skills now produces virtual exhibitions as a normal part of research output, and the custom uploads mean each space can be dressed to the material and not be constrained by a template.
NRC Thailand's Space
Visit the space for yourself and see what Metasteps' platform is capable of.
Visit the spaceYour content is already digital. Make it worth visiting.
Turn any kind of existing data into a 3D space people explore on desktop, on mobile, on tablet, on a VR headset.