3D Museumsby George Oates

glo@museuminabox.org

MUSEUMS ASSOCIATION TECH CONFERENCE MANCHESTER, 21 JANUARY 2016

Hello! Thank you to the Museums Association for inviting me to be here today.

I’d like to talk to you about our Museum in a Box project. We’ve brought some boxes for you to play with over lunch, and Tom is going to be explaining more about making 3D scans after lunch, so stick around for that.

gfns.uk

My name is George Oates, and I’m a software designer. I’ve made web things for about 20 years now. I run a company called Good, Form & Spectacle, a design firm that’s focussed on cultural heritage work.

R&D Tools, Products

Clients

gfns.uk

I’m working hard to construct the company along three lines: R&D, Tools and Products, and Client projects.

So far, we’ve mostly built new, exploratory web interfaces for catalogues containing millions of things, like the British Museum, or the Wellcome Library. You can have a look at those if you’re curious, at the URL there.

Today I’d like to show you one of our major research projects, and how it’s evolved in the year or so we’ve been working on it. It’s about 3D printing, internet of things, museum objects, and interaction design.

The Small MuseumThe Small Museum

It’s first instantiation was a popup museum that we ran for 10 days at Somerset House in London, which we called The Small Museum. This is a photo of the room we had, which was pretty small. What you see is what we had to work with.

The museum turned out to be the table we found in the room. It was a great design constraint, which ended up driving the entire project.

The format of the museum was derived from its space, literally.

Each day we would lay down a new museum, choose an object to focus on, and then research how it found its way into the British Museum collection.

Each day, we’d add the previous day’s museum to the wall, and start again. Day 1 is on the right.

This display was really useful to explain what we were up to.

Tom Flynn

Harriet Maxwell

There were three of us there for the whole 10 days, and we also had quite a lot of friends and other interested folk pop in to help out, like Catherine Jones from the Science Museum, who helped us on Day 2 tinkering with our exhibit about Hoa Hakananai.

V1 March 2015Our collection was a set of 10 3D prints of objects from the British Museum. Selected because they were available, and come from all over the world.

March 2015

For example, on Day 4, we chose this Nandi Bull. Nandi is the steed of Shiva, so there are Nandi statues outside every temple to Shiva. When you look at Nandi in the museum, he’s stuck in a cold blue corridor, all alone, but out in the world he’s surrounded by people, fire, prayers, food, smoke, and energy. We made an installation to try to get at that difference.

March 2015

On Day 4, we started thinking about how the object itself could prompt a display, or information about it. You pick it up, you learn something.

This is a video. Apologies, Slideshare friends.

March 2015

I knew I wanted to do a day’s work on Internet of Things ideas… so on Day 5, we did a whole day of experiments with little computers, and stuck RFID tags to all the objects. That green thing is the RFID tag reader. You sit the object on it, something happens.

I have a couple of videos we made of our work.

March 2015

This is a video of the second thing we made, exploring the idea of how the nature of the object could stimulate specific interfaces, in this case, using the Rosetta Stone replica as a trigger to translate things.

March 2015

The Arthur & Henry Maxwell Bequest

museuminabox.org

So, our experience at Somerset House was really encouraging. People responded really well to the work, and particularly enjoyed some of the interactive stuff I just showed you.

We decided to pursue it, and make it into its own thing, called Museum in a Box.

Tom and I have started a new company together to focus on it.

Museum 1

Museum 2

Museum 3

Here’s the general idea…

Box 1

Box 2

Museum 1

Museum 2

Museum 3

Cross-pollinationCurious objectsNew collections?

+ Raspberry Pi (or other small computer)

Here’s the idea…

You have a box of objects.

+ Raspberry Pi (or other small computer)

[ Content ]

And the box has a small computer in it, which we’ve called “The Brain”. We’re using Raspberry PIs for now. The Brain knows which objects it has.

When you boop an object on the brain, it tells you things.

V2 November 2015

Round 2 was a bit of thinking through the form factor and interaction. I made a paper prototype to show people and get feedback.

It was really fun to make something with my hands.

November 2015

November 2015

We wanted to assemble a specific box for V2, one that demonstrated the idea that the box contents could come from different museums. I thought that a box of masks would be relatively simple to assemble. But, it wasn’t.

Surprisingly, we have been able to work quite closely with the big kahuna, the British Museum.

This is Jago from the British Museum with one of his favourite objects, a slightly macabre wooden figure of a slave that was executed. The object was in a safe room in the basement of the museum, wrapped up in lots of paper.

November 2015

We took lots of photos of it, using a scanning process called photogrammetry, which Tom is going to tell you more about this afternoon.

V3 December 2015V3 was about making working prototypes, with working brains.

These are the components of the brain. All fairly straightforward.

December 2015

We made three slightly different brains, for three slightly different boxes. And they work! And it’s fun!

Institution in a Box

Syllabus in a Box

Theme in a Box

Class Project in a Box

Exhibition in a Box

We’re fleshing out types of boxes we’d like to make… if you’d like to make a box with us along one of these lines, please do say hi.

Antiquity Prompt

Scarcity Abundance

Object Document

Inert Mobilised

ORIGINAL 3D / REPLICA

As we’ve been working on how to explain this idea and place a business case around it, I’ve been considering the allowances of these 3D prints of things compared with original objects…

What is copies of objects can talk to each other?What if you could see when objects are handled?What if two classrooms could collaborate around an object? What if you could recreate a 50 year old exhibition in a box?

Early observations• Institutions aren’t ready for ad-hoc

digitisation requests

• There’s no pattern for dealing with potential for commercial use

• Most tech challenges are cultural challenges in disguise

Early observations• Institutions aren’t ready for ad-hoc

digitisation requests

• There’s no pattern for dealing with potential for commercial use

• Most tech challenges are cultural challenges in disguise

Next steps?• Help people learn about 3D digitisation -

see us about workshops!

• Start an online forum for conversation

• Work with educators about content

• Develop an [Institution] in a Box

• Test a box in two classrooms

The guts of the tech is more or less done. Already.

Thank you! George Oates

glo@museuminabox.org @_museuminabox museuminabox.org

github.com/museuminabox