Augmented Reality On Display: How might augmented reality technology be used to create meaningful interactive museum exhibits?

<p>The aim of this thesis is to explore augmented reality technology and the methods in which it can be applied to museum displays to enriching the experience of visitors. Artefacts within museums have rich histories which are not always apparent. This is due to the way artefacts are currently displayed and the way information is communicated in exhibitions. is project will set out design guidelines to inform the development of augmenting museum experiences. These guidelines will provide criteria and parameters for the use of augmented reality in museums, and will also be accessible to museum staff to create or enhance existing exhibits for visitors. The guidelines will be produced through a combination of different contextual research methods and will inform a final designed case study. These contextual research methods include: completing a practical exploration of augmented reality exhibits, reviewing museum practice and conducting a series of interviews directed at augmented reality experts. Once these guidelines are produced they will be tested using research through design and human centred design methods in a final case study. The findings of this thesis aim to emphasise how augmented reality is a tool for enhancing the communication of contextual history. It also forms the basis for further research into how augmented reality’s combination of virtual and physical worlds can broaden our experience of the museum space.</p>

Augmented Reality On Display: How might augmented reality technology be used to create meaningful interactive museum exhibits?

<p>The aim of this thesis is to explore augmented reality technology and the methods in which it can be applied to museum displays to enriching the experience of visitors. Artefacts within museums have rich histories which are not always apparent. This is due to the way artefacts are currently displayed and the way information is communicated in exhibitions. is project will set out design guidelines to inform the development of augmenting museum experiences. These guidelines will provide criteria and parameters for the use of augmented reality in museums, and will also be accessible to museum staff to create or enhance existing exhibits for visitors. The guidelines will be produced through a combination of different contextual research methods and will inform a final designed case study. These contextual research methods include: completing a practical exploration of augmented reality exhibits, reviewing museum practice and conducting a series of interviews directed at augmented reality experts. Once these guidelines are produced they will be tested using research through design and human centred design methods in a final case study. The findings of this thesis aim to emphasise how augmented reality is a tool for enhancing the communication of contextual history. It also forms the basis for further research into how augmented reality’s combination of virtual and physical worlds can broaden our experience of the museum space.</p>

Constructing Meanings: The Museum as a Stage Set for the Presentation of Archeological Collections

Museums are real places that in a dematerializing world offer an encounter between visitors and tangible objects. With the shift of museum buildings away from recognizable types to heterogeneity and experimentation, as well as the greater emphasis placed on the visitor’s engagement with the museum, the issue of the role of museum architecture in relation to the collections it is designed to accommodate has become a key challenge. This paper argues that museum buildings as organized spaces can contribute to constructing meanings and become part of the distinctive experience of the collections each museum offers. It analyses three archeological museums with newly built or extended buildings, that experiment with novel ways of presenting their collections, and shows how the tension between visitors’ paths of movement and lines of sight can become the conceptual spine of the museum displays and stage the presentation of archeological objects. Three modalities of staging are identified, suggesting a critical shift: from emphasis on a theoretical concept, to attribution of symbolic meaning, and then to embodied, sensory and affective contextualization. This is argued to reflect the “experiential turn” in museums and the increasing understanding of meaning as being grounded in our bodily experience.

Beyond Charles Knight: Women paleoartists at the American Museum of Natural History in the early twentieth century

ABSTRACT Under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Charles Knight helped shape popular images of the prehistoric past in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen turies. Although he was the most famous, Charles Knight was not the only paleoartist working at the American Museum of Natural History at this time. Behind the scenes, there were several women paleoartists who made significant contributions to museum displays and publications illustrating the prehistoric world. Often overlooked, this chapter highlights the contributions of Elisabeth Rungius Fulda, Helen Ziska, Lindsey Morris Sterling, and Margret Joy Flinsch Buba.

Fossil illustrations in three dimensions: Ward’s models at Cornell University

ABSTRACT Some fossil examples are rare, but the educational value of such samples is undeniable. One way around this dilemma, and one that was popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was to have students study 3-D models; this solution was used by many universities, among them Cornell University. One of the main, but not the only, suppliers of such models was Ward’s Natural Science Establishment of Rochester, New York, USA, which was founded in 1862 by Henry Augustus Ward (1834–1906). Even today the use of virtual, computer-generated 3-D models in classroom laboratories indicates how important 3-D visualization continues to be. But a computer image cannot be held in one’s hands, so the use of 3-D printer technology allows students to create their own physical models. However, none of these technologies can totally replace seeing and working with actual specimens or life-sized reproductions. Thus, museum displays are still an important aspect of educational activity for both students and the general public. This chapter explores how Cornell University made use of the models purchased from Ward’s in the late 1800s and the fate of some of these replicas.

Documenting Paintings with Gigapixel Photography

Digital photographic capture of pictorial artworks with gigapixel resolution (around 1000 megapixels or greater) is a novel technique that is beginning to be used by some important international museums as a means of documentation, analysis, and dissemination of their masterpieces. This line of research is extremely interesting, not only for art curators and scholars but also for the general public. The results can be disseminated through online virtual museum displays, offering a detailed interactive visualization. These virtual visualizations allow the viewer to delve into the artwork in such a way that it is possible to zoom in and observe those details, which would be negligible to the naked eye in a real visit. Therefore, this kind of virtual visualization using gigapixel images has become an essential tool to enhance cultural heritage and to make it accessible to everyone. Since today’s professional digital cameras provide images of around 40 megapixels, obtaining gigapixel images requires some special capture and editing techniques. This article describes a series of photographic methodologies and equipment, developed by the team of researchers, that have been put into practice to achieve a very high level of detail and chromatic fidelity, in the documentation and dissemination of pictorial artworks. The result of this research work consisted in the gigapixel documentation of several masterpieces of the Museo de Bellas Artes of Valencia, one of the main art galleries in Spain. The results will be disseminated through the Internet, as will be shown with some examples.

RECITE: A framework for user trajectory analysis in cultural sites

The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently been applied in the domain of cultural exhibition enabling the cultural sites to provide more personal and proactive experiences to their visitors. To come up with valuable services, several solutions to analyze the spatio-temporal trajectories of visitors have been put forward. However, they neither consider the inherent uncertainty of the underlying indoor positioning technologies – Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), RFID, etc. – nor other visitors’ features apart from the spatio-temporal ones (e.g. the level of interaction with the museum displays). For that reason, the present work introduces RECITE, a framework to classify trajectories representing visitors’ actions that copes with the aforementioned limitations of existing solutions. Firstly, RECITE states a novel mapping process for a BLE-based indoor positioning system to accurately detect the visitors’ locations. On top of this mechanism, RECITE includes an ensemble of fuzzy rule classifiers able to tag the visitors’ ongoing trajectories in real time considering both spatio-temporal and other behavioural factors. Finally, the framework has been evaluated in a case of use scenario showing quite promising results.

The Lives of Objects beyond Ownership

Provenance history sheds light on the relationship between works of art and the social, political, and economic conditions of their biographies. Engaging with the provenance of objects establishes a cultural conversation across time and space with previous owners. For artworks in museums, the public has now entered into that conversation. Museums, as custodians of art and educators of the public, can play a significant role in going beyond the question of ownership to get to the heart of what provenance reveals about the meanings of art: the ways people bring art into their lives, and the ways that objects are loved and studied. This essay delves into these human aspects of provenance, which are too often absent from museum displays, and argues in favor of making this information more visible to the public. Finally, works by contemporary artists Hans Haacke and Maria Eichhorn are discussed as examples of projects that successfully expose complicated object histories and provenance within museum installations.