Following on from my love letter to Augmented Reality, there’s something I touched on at the end that looks like something worth following up. Almost at the same time I was thinking about it, I watched another keynote speech by Bruce Sterling to the guys at the Layar Augmented reality browser launch event. (For those who don’t know, Layar is a great little app for Android smartphones). About halfway through the speech, Sterling gave a very interesting suggestion for the AR industry to combat the inevitable lowbrow/downmarket uses by being involved in museum culture.
How exactly is that going to work?
I’ve alluded to this many times; AR would allow for more information to be “connected” to an object, and I left it at that. You could take a painting or an archaeological treasure and surround it with extra bits of media, floating text boxes, video or maybe a ghostly hyperlink to a collection database entry (if you’re unimaginative).
Stuff that you could do on paper and screens, ultimately. Oh, you could design a better UI to hold the information. Historically, museums aren’t interested in that. Something like AR that smells a bit like an “optical Internet” (a phrase Bruce Sterling rightfully sneers at), it’s most likely going to be a bought product or outsourced to a freelancer. Few museums will want to get involved with designing that architecture. They’ll want to buy something they can fill. So what can AR do for collections management?
I pull this image from Marieke Guy’s Rambling of a Remote Worker. It’s the Gartner Hype Cycle, a graphic to show where a lot of new technologies are and where they’re going and predictions about how long it will take. What’s right next to Augmented Reality in the Technology Trigger phase, heading towards the Peak of Inflated Expectations?
3D Printing. Or fabricators, as they’re being called in some circles. 3D Printing is very cool (via Ectoplasmosis).
So, we have two emerging technologies, one that can make all kinds of information or 3D images dance before our eyes, and another that can print out 3D objects. Remind me again why museums are still Draconian over photographs? Whether it’s holding onto increasingly meaningless intangible assets or holding onto an ultra-materialistic purpose of controlling access, we are rapidly heading towards a cultural state where it won’t matter. Your photographs and image protection will almost seem quaint. Best thing to do would be to open it up and get it all out there like some museums are doing, getting some interest in them and some use out of them because otherwise it will look like you’re desperately protecting your own handful of sand.
3D printers and 3D overlays. You’d think that some serious 3D scanning equipment is going to be needed soon, right? I can’t imagine we will entirely rely upon 3D modellers and 3D animators to deliver this. I doubt people are going to pay someone to sit down and create thousands of models with Sketchup.
This will be the next step in digitising collections.
It’s going to be a pain. I doubt everyone has got around to photographing their entire collections yet, and now we have to give each one something akin to an MRI? Where are we going to get a scanner big enough to go around our twelve foot high statue? And do we really have to scan in every single archaeological fragment and splinter?
But think how cool it would be. Download a 3D model to your phone and spin it around, look underneath it, look really closely if the resolution is good enough. Look at it as an X-Ray, infrared or something similar (then spin it around again). Hell, if 3D printers get into homes, why can’t I print out one inch-high paper models of my favourite museum objects? Or download 3D models onto your own AR museum layout, moving around bits of QR coded paper as your webcam tells you how you’re repositioning Roman pottery. Maybe even a little AR curator could follow you around and belittle your efforts of exhibition design or grasp of Art History.
AR people need a good cultural foundation. Museums have a big resource to make it happen.
