Video: Virtual tour brings galleries back to life
HAVE you ever longed to visit an exhibition that no longer exists? Now you can – virtually. The Science Museum in London has harnessed technology originally developed to study clouds, and used it to capture a now defunct gallery in exquisite detail.
A much-loved childhood memory for many, the museum’s shipping gallery launched in 1963 and charted maritime milestones and technologies. But it closed last year in order to make way for an exhibition on the information age, due to open in September 2014.
Before the gallery and its 1800 objects were dismantled and packed away, the whole collection was scanned, using a laser system known as lidar – similar to radar, but based on beams of visible light. The first effort on this scale, the project preserved the shipping gallery in 275 images, amounting to 256 gigabytes of data.
You can now step back in time by watching a short video which whisks you through the gallery’s historic exhibits as they were, and learn something along the way from the video’s commentary by the museum’s curator of transport, David Rooney.
The video’s visuals were created by stitching together 2 billion laser measurements to create a 3D representation of the entire gallery. A computer compares the outgoing laser signal with what bounces back to calculate the dimensions of the gallery, and the positions of every object and surface in it. The principle is similar to that used in sonar or echolocation, says William Trossell, a co-director of ScanLAB, which worked with the Science Museum and University College London to capture the data and make the video.
To have the curator give you a personal tour is not bad for any museum visit. And with the virtual tour, there are no jostling elbows to contend with: the experience is serene, informative (thanks to Rooney’s insights) and strangely relaxing.
There are no jostling elbows to contend with: the experience is serene and informative
There’s plenty here to tantalise. Rooney alludes to controversy in the tragic tale of the Arandora Star, a cruise ship turned transport ship during the second world war, which was torpedoed in 1940, sending hundreds to a watery grave. The video lingers over the shipping gallery’s centrepiece, the majestic blue-robed figurehead of HMS North Star, leaving you wondering what stories she could tell. Alas, these mysteries go unexplored in the video.
But all is not lost. The museum used only one-tenth of the lidar data in constructing the virtual environment depicted in the video taster. The full data set will be released to the public before the year is out, in the hope that inspired whizz-kids will make more of it.
Beautiful though any virtual exploration of a gallery could be, it’s a different experience to walking around a gallery and allowing the artefacts to impart a sense of their history, and often of awe as well. Even its developers agree that physical museums will not be challenged by this technology. “I really don’t think this is going to impact on the number of people going to museums,” says Trossell.
But the shipping gallery project hints at the potential for preserving exhibitions beyond their physical life, or increasing the reach of museums. Other museums are archiving artefacts and galleries using the same techniques, says Trossell. The Smithsonian Institution in the US, for example, has large amounts of digital data recording objects, especially those in its natural history departments, he adds, though they have not created a virtual gallery from it – yet.
At the end of Rooney’s tour, he says thoughtfully: “I can’t wait to see how this technology develops. These guys have made a time machine.” I can’t help but agree.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Ghost ships set sail”
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