Heritage in 3-D: Using QTVR™, Cubic VR and Adobe Atmospheres for Interactive Presentation of Cultural Heritage

July 13-19, 2002

Instructor

Jim Devine, Head of Education and Digital Media Resources, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, Scotland

Overview

This week long series of workshops will examine the uses of interactive techniques such as QuickTime VR, Cubic VR, and Adobe Atmospheres to present cultural and scientific resources for educational users on the web and on CD ROM. The course will have look at the pedagogical issues in using theses techniques, and will provide "hands-on" training in the production of these resources.

The advent of interactive digital technologies has provided cultural heritage organizations with an opportunity to utilize these emergent computer technologies to present their cultural resources for educational users in new and increasingly innovative ways. This ability to present information electronically can be used to bring the user together with museum artefacts and the sites and monuments from which they originally came, thus digitally placing the objects in their archaeological and historical contexts

With the increasingly sophisticated software applications being developed, the opportunity now exists to allow a museums and galleries to display their contents to a global audience. Not only can the exhibits on display in the galleries be made available to a wider audience but also artefacts, which are in store, can be shown. Objects which are, for example, too fragile for permanent exhibition can be photographed and displayed electronically. We can also record the material collected for temporary exhibitions and allow visitors to view the exhibition long after the material has been dispersed back to its original owners. We can effectively build a 'virtual museum', which extends the physical museum both by allowing remote worldwide access to our exhibits and building special displays which have no physical existence.

The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery http://www.hunterian.ac.uk in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution, have established leading edge practices in the field of digital imaging for the scientific and cultural heritage sector. This collaborative project has developed examples of best practice in skills-sharing between the Education and Digital Media Service at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, and the Office of Scientific Imaging and Photography at the National Museum of Natural History http://www.nmnh.si.edu at the Smithsonian.

Case Studies:

A number of "best practice" case studies will be examined including:

The Romans in Scotland Multimedia Web/CD project

The project uses QuickTime Virtual Reality techniques for presentation of the Roman sites on the Antonine Wall and elsewhere in Scotland from which the objects were excavated. This allows schools in Scotland and internationally, to access this resource material on the computer monitor in the classroom via network link and CD Rom in a new and innovative way, and encourage a better understanding of museum artefacts and historic sites as primary sources for interpreting the past.