A new way to alleviate the anxiety of exhibitions
Into a museum today, if you find people around you poke with a mobile phone, or wear VR glasses to shake your head up and down, it is not that they went wrong. Instead, it is touching a world of exhibitions that spans the dimension.
This is the museum that is being “reset” by XR technology.
The so-called XR (Extended Reality) is the fusion of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) and many other familiar visual interaction technologies to achieve no between the virtual world and the real world. The “immersion” experience of seam transformation.
The relationship between XR technology and the museum is far older than imagined. As early as 2003, VR appeared in the experience context of the museum. The Palace Museum established the Digital Institute of Cultural Assets. The first work to be shown to the public was the VR film “The Forbidden City: The Palace of the Son of Heaven.” However, this novelty really began to break out, or it should start from the 2016 VR/AR technology and enter the public eye.
How did this technological iteration that spanned time, region, and culture happen?
Technical wheels that have run through “museum fatigue”
Since 1916, Gilman has created a vocabulary – museum fatigue, and since then, the phenomenon of physical and mental exhaustion when visiting museums has attracted the attention of countless researchers. It can be said that every self-reform of the museum is centered around this core pain point.
We know that visiting a museum can be as simple as bringing a document and dialing the crowd in front of the cabinet to see it. But there are many unspeakable secrets in this. For example, when visiting a museum, even if you try hard to concentrate, it is easy to feel tired and bored. Or the venue is too big. If you go to the soles of your feet, you won’t be able to see it. If you don’t finish it, you can’t finish it. Things can only be allocated to less than ten seconds. When you walk out of the exhibition hall, you will unconsciously become a philosopher and ask “Who am I and where I am?”…
If you have this feeling, you may not be lacking in artistic cells.Or the lack of knowledge reserves, high awareness, and so on, is likely to be just like most people, because they have to breathe through the walls of the exhibition, suffering from “Museum Fatigue” Museum fatigue.
In order to solve this problem, major museums have been working hard, and the main ideas are summed up in two:
One is to move from type display to narrative type. Before the middle of the 20th century, museums paid more attention to “collection” and “research”. However, according to the traditional exhibitions of style and category display, it is easy to make people feel tired after watching the collection for a long time. Since the 1970s, museums have gradually emphasized how to communicate with the audience, and the narrative, interesting, and interactive nature of the exhibition has become important. Many new concepts and new methods have been introduced into museums, such as voice interpreters.
64 years ago, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam launched the first museum audio guide. Since then, this hardware that tells the story and provides more information has become an integral part of the museum experience.
The second is to continuously expand the form of expression based on the unit information density. In general, museum exhibitions are to highlight the artifacts themselves. However, with the development of the industry and the socialization of the exhibition project, on the one hand, the museum is constantly pursuing “sharp pressure”, and the scale of the venue is larger than one; and the curator also likes to make “platform” for the sake of design aesthetics and market efficiency. Super-large exhibition. This kind of information density, even if the professional audience stares at a piece of work, is only a short 17-24 seconds. Therefore, it is crucial to continuously improve the information dimension within the unit and reduce the cognitive anxiety of the audience.
Exhibition with LED screens, projections and animations, and even documentaries, to let the audience know more about the collection on the basis of text introduction, is nothing new. The new technology XR, which breaks the boundaries of time and space, naturally will not escape the blue eyes of the museum.
Unreal and Real: XR Exploration of the Museum
How XR helps people alleviate “museum fatigue”, we have seenAdvanced exploration of many museums.
One of the ways to make the most cost-effective transformation is to use the App on your mobile phone to combine the augmented reality (AR) technology to enrich the content and interactivity of the exhibition.
The Detroit Institute of Art at the Lumin Tour Show in 2017 used AR to display information about art, such as “X-rays” on an ancient mummy, allowing viewers to see its external and internal bones. The information that is hidden is helpful to understand the many unknown details of the cultural relics, which is difficult for traditional museums.
Beyond AR, you can use VR equipment to construct a virtual space, let the audience “immersively” traverse back to the past, “field” to feel the cultural style conveyed by the exhibition.
This experience can be easily grafted onto the original display through VR device and content development, which is almost standard for large museums.
The audience can cross the Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province and experience the 14,000-square-foot enamel archaeological site. They can also use the Samsung Gear VR to return to the Bronze Age at the British Museum to participate in ancient rituals such as the sacrificial sun. The footsteps of the workers, from the museum through the women’s tomb to dig the scene, to understand the process of cultural relics to open the history of dust, or directly into a painting, in a new way to feel the scenery of the artist’s pen, face-to-face with the people in the painting… …
(In the Dali Museum, visitors wear VR helmets into Dali’s paintings)
Of course, perhaps the passive acceptance of this knowledge is still boring, so interactive viewing may hit the hearts of free-style audiences.
The original treasure that can only be seen from afarmany.
There are a large number of cultural relics in the museum that need to be digitally reconstructed through deep camera and 3D laser radar. In addition to the need to refine and non-destructively restore exhibit information, how to ensure that mobile terminals with different configurations and different languages can be stably and quickly Read the content you need through AR and VR devices?
This requires the use of an algorithmic model to “know the autumn”.
We know that in the dimly lit, reflective environment, the signal-to-noise ratio of the image captured by the camera will be relatively high, which makes the machine often unable to quickly and accurately identify the outside world, which is almost the daily state of the museum exhibition.
How to make AR/VR devices accurately recognize paintings and exhibits at different angles in the museum, and then display their attributes and artistic style to the audience. This requires a higher performance image recognition algorithm to escort. .
For example, Google has trained a machine vision engine that recognizes museum paintings by taxonomy, from Canaletto’s Venice Grand Canal from the Frangini Palace to San Marco La Campo, precisely Recognized the four themes of “boating, rowing, gondolas and painting”.
Another interesting AI application is a combination of knowledge maps that expands the recognition and recognition of exhibits.
In most cases, we can only appreciate an item in a specific museum, extract key information from the exhibits by algorithm, find similar exhibits in other museums in the world, or associate products, which allows people to cross Time and space restrictions, from a macroscopic understanding of the history of collections, development of origin, art categories, etc. become possible.
It is worth mentioning that using VR and other equipment, online and offline viewers’ key data on exhibits’ preferences, browsing frequency, etc., can also be used for the secondary dissemination, curation, and cultural creation of the museum with the help of AI. Derivative services such as IP provide important decision support. The premise of all this is that AI should be able to read important information such as the content and emotions expressed by the artworks.
MIT’s AI Lab, which works with IBM, used 45,000 paintings to train their algorithmic models, including from the literary complex.The artistic portraits of the early to the modern era, and then let the machine understand the 15th century European style art portraits. This move can also help the virtual museum flexibly adjust the exhibition, and use more market-oriented exhibits to make more potential people more interested in entering the museum.
(Works generated by the AI Portraits algorithm)
At present, the Harvard Art Museum, the Norwegian National Museum, and the Palace Museum have all begun to try to introduce AI into the museum renovation program. In the end, it will work with VR to change the life of several generations silently.
Some people say that VR and other pan-realistic technologies continue to innovate in museums. However, through some analysis, we find that the biggest value behind XR’s cool appearance is to provide an aesthetic way beyond traditional thinking. With the constant release of innovation and imagination, we can paving the way for the museum to thrive.