Transitions: From the Old Order to the New, 1890-1930: A Case Study in Virtual Exhibition Design
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Visual Resources Association Annual Conference March 26-29, 2019, Los Angeles Session: Mapping New Vistas: Employing Emerging Technologies into Your Visual Resources Services Presenter: Andrew Maurer
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Transitions: From the Old Order to the New, 1890-1930: A Case Study in Virtual Exhibition Design
- 1. Transitions: From the Old Order to the New, 1890- 1930 A Case Study in Virtual Exhibition Design Andrew Maurer The Imaging Center at Smith College
- 3. “Pre-pilot” virtual environment projects ● VR version of Art Department gallery ● Student projects
- 4. German Department Class ● Faculty member’s collection of German ephemera ● Class culminates in student- curated exhibition of objects and related research
- 5. Neilson Library ● Under construction through 2020
- 8. Our Team
- 9. Imaging Center ● Object scanning and cataloging ● Artstor ● Virtual exhibit design
- 10. Imaging Center Artstor Wordpress Site Virtual Environment (Unity) Scanned materials Student research 3D objects Formatted page via Wordpress API The Public Companion exhibit at SCMA ● Object scanning and cataloging ● Artstor ● Virtual exhibit design
- 11. Educational Technology Services ● Creation and maintenance of Wordpress site ● Formatting of pages for display in virtual exhibit, using netlify and Wordpress REST API
- 12. Educational Technology Services ● Creation and maintenance of Wordpress site ● Formatting of pages for display in virtual exhibit, using netlify and Wordpress REST API Artstor Wordpress Site Virtual Environment (Unity) Scanned materials Student research 3D objects Formatted page via Wordpress API The Public Companion exhibit at SCMA
- 13. Smith College Museum of Art ● Exhibition design assistance ● Companion exhibit of works on paper at museum Artstor Wordpress Site Virtual Environment (Unity) Scanned materials Student research 3D objects Formatted page via Wordpress API The Public Companion exhibit at SCMA
- 14. Smith College Museum of Art ● Exhibition design assistance ● Companion exhibit of works on paper at museum
- 15. The Students Six students in the class, working in groups of two ● Curation ● Arrangement of objects in the space ● Original research Artstor Wordpress Site Virtual Environment (Unity) Scanned materials Student research 3D objects Formatted page via Wordpress API The Public Companion exhibit at SCMA
- 17. Technical Considerations ● Rendered virtual environment vs. website ○ Priority on physical exhibition design aspect ● Desktop vs. browser-based vs. VR ○ Desktop allows wider distribution than VR ○ Technical limitations of rendering virtual environment in a browser
- 18. Technical Considerations ● Rendered virtual environment vs. website ○ Priority on physical exhibition design aspect ● Desktop vs. browser-based vs. VR ○ Desktop allows wider distribution than VR ○ Technical limitations of rendering virtual environment in a browser
- 19. Software Content creation ● Maya ● Substance ● Found and purchased assets
- 20. Software Bringing it all together ● Unity ● Plugins from Unity asset store ○ First Person Exploration Kit ○ ZF Browser
- 21. Software Unity ● Approachable, though there’s a learning curve ● You can get by without doing any coding, but writing a little bit of C# is helpful ● Excellent documentation, many resources available ● If I can figure it out, so can you
- 22. Conclusion
- 23. Future Considerations Scalability ● How to integrate student workers? ● More scripting for repetitive tasks, creating open-source library of utilities? Further Exploration of Virtual Space ● Navigation ● Gameplay elements
Editor's Notes
- Hi! I’m Andrew Maurer, also from the Smith College Imaging Center, and in this presentation I’m going to talk about a virtual exhibition that I helped to design last semester, called Transitions: From the Old Order to the New, centered on Germany during the period of 1890-1930. First I’ll outline the background leading up to the project, then talk about the form it ended up taking, and then discuss a little about the technical and logistical aspects of how we made it all work.
- So, a couple of factors came together in creating this project (next slide)
- First, our department and several others at the college had begun to invest in VR technology. I had attended a few workshops and things. Additionally, our department had begun a partnership with Film and Media studies to host a video gaming lab. So we had some equipment available, and I have an interest in computer graphics and was looking for projects that would publicize our ability to make 3D and VR content, so I worked on several special studies projects with students and also created a VR version of our main Art Dept gallery space. And I think of these as sort of “pre-pilot” projects where I was really just working to have examples of things that we could show to people to get them interested in the possibilities. I’m glossing over the technical details of this stuff right now but I’ll dive into that later on.
- The second contributing factor to the project was a class that a German faculty member had taught several times, in which students would research a selection of his personal collection of early 20th-century German ephemera (trading cards, ration stamps, inflation money, things like that), and produce a curated exhibition in which they presented their research alongside the physical objects. Previously this exhibition had been held in the rare book gallery in our main library. However, the current state of our library is… (next slide)
- This. So in other words, our library currently does not exist. Currently the only part standing is the brick facade because that is going to be incorporated into the new library that’s being built and is slated to open in the fall of 2020. So, since the physical space was unavailable, the professor wanted to brainstorm possibilities for on online exhibition. I showed him the virtual gallery space that I had created previously, and he became interested in doing something similar. So that kind of came together nicely, and that ended up being the prompt for this project.
- Which leads me to...
- READ THIS RELATIVELY SLOWLY, LETTING VIDEO PLAY Ultimately, we ended up with this. Right now you’re seeing video documentation of a desktop-PC-based, virtual exhibition hall which the user can walk around freely and explore. The arrangement of objects in the space was curated by the students in the class. Clicking on objects brings up a more detailed “object browser” view, represented by a picture frame, which displays a higher-resolution version of the image accompanied by metadata and interpretive text written by the students. The text and images in the “object browser” view are actually pulled down live from a separate website which the students posted to. And that website now serves as both a link to the downloadable virtual environment, and as a repository of the images and texts, which is kind of a nice bonus. I’ll skip around here a little and show you a couple of other parts of the gallery now (SHOW BOOKMARKS). BOOKMARKS: Object browser in war room, 3:10 Wheelbarrow sit-down, 4:45 Students and stuff at end, 5:24 So now that you’ve seen the end product, I’ll talk a little about how we made some of the decisions leading to this.
- There were a lot of moving parts to this project, and it wouldn’t have been possible without partnering with other groups on campus, so I’ll talk a little bit now about the several departments that we worked with on this and how we organized everything.
- On the Imaging Center side, Jon and our student workers scanned and cataloged what turned out to be hundreds of objects and put them into an institutional collection in Artstor. And in fact the faculty member kept actively acquiring new material and giving it to us during this process so it was a major undertaking—I think Jon had to kind of cut him off at some point. The students in the class then got the images from Artstor to create their posts on the Wordpress site which are then displayed within the virtual environment. Additionally, the interpretive texts that the students wrote for the materials will be incorporated into the Artstor metadata for those objects, so that’s another useful outcome of this project..
- I honestly don’t know how helpful this really is but I just desperately wanted to make a flowchart for this presentation, so there you have it. The highlighted boxes show the parts of the process taken on by the Imaging Center.
- The actual creation of that Wordpress site was handled by Educational Technology Services, which is under the IT umbrella and which deals with the campus-wide online learning systems like our campus Wordpress installation, Moodle, that kind of thing. In addition to creating the website, they also created sort of a ”formatter” for us to access the content on the site, so that I could pull down just a single image and description that‘s formatted specifically to go into the virtual environment, and isn’t cluttered with menus and headings and navigational things, for example, but is still being pulled down from the data on the website.
- I think that one of the really key parts of this project is that, technically speaking, since we separated the virtual environment, which I was working on, from the research content of the project, which we located on the website and which the students had direct access to, this allowed any changes the students made to be displayed in real time in the virtual environment without me needing to change anything in Unity, the game engine software. It also gave the students a more hands-on technical role.
- Our other partner on this project was the Smith College Museum of Art. Their educational coordinator worked with the students throughout the semester to discuss issues about exhibition design.
- Additionally, the students actually worked with her to create another, physical, exhibition of relevant works from the museum’s collection, which was displayed in one of the museum’s works-on-paper cabinets. We held the opening of our virtual exhibition in the museum's atrium so that we could then have visitors go up to check out the physical companion exhibit at the museum, which was a really nice way to do it.
- And then most importantly, the final part of the team was the students, who I consulted with about the design of the space, and who were responsible for curating the objects, for specifying the layout of the objects in the space, and for researching them and producing the interpretive text to go with them. The students also chose period film clips and music and recorded narration as part of this, too.
- So that was sort of a logistical overview of how the project came together, and now I’ll give you a brief run-down of some of the technical aspects of the virtual gallery.
- First, we decided to go with a fully 3D, rendered environment because the class emphasizes the production of a physical exhibition, and creating this kind of architectural framework gave the students some elements of that experience. Once I had created the rooms I gave them a blueprint basically, which they were then able to use for planning purposes. (SWITCH TO NEXT SLIDE)
- These are a couple other early stage photos of the project, and it’s kind of funny, I had forgotten that I did this until I was putting this presentation together, but I would leave to-do notes to myself floating in mid-air in the space, to remind myself of what the next steps were. Another technical consideration the team discussed was the platform. We decided not to produce something that would require a VR headset to view, because relatively few people have VR headsets. We had originally planned to run the virtual environment from within a web browser, so that you wouldn’t have to download anything, but since we are actually running a web browser WITHIN the virtual environment itself to display information, there were technical limitations that made it more practical to make the program a stand-alone desktop app, which is then just downloaded and run on your own computer.
- There are lots of professionally-produced 3D models that you can find online. I used a combination of things made from scratch by me and ready-made assets. For the 3D objects that I produced, I used Maya for building the geometry of the objects, and primarily Substance Designer for texturing them. Again there are a lot of different options for this, that’s just what I’m comfortable with.
- In terms of bringing all the content together into a final product, the software I used for that is Unity, which is a game engine, which basically is software that allows you to take 3D models and media files and put them into a unified virtual space and determine how they’re going to interact with each other, and how the user interacts with those things. We use Unity because it’s free for non-commercial use, it’s very flexible and powerful, and it has a broad community of users and is well-supported. It also has a built-in asset store that is a great source for plugins that can save a lot of time. And the asset store also has pre-made 3D objects you can buy. I used a couple of really helpful plugins for this project, one of which was called First Person Exploration Kit, which I just modified a bit to produce the specific kinds of interactions we were looking for, and then the other plugin I used is called ZF Browser, which basically runs the Chrome browser within Unity so that you can render web pages on any 3D surface. So, I would recommend both of those if you’re doing a project like this.
- A few notes about Unity: it’s made to be a generic platform, so anything you want it to do you have to tell it to do, though there are plugins, as I said, and also some default libraries and things that come with it that can take care of some of the legwork. It’s not strictly necessary to write code to use Unity, though if you need to do a very specific thing, or a repetitive thing, you’ll find that writing a script can often be a big time-saver. As one small example of that, I wrote a script that automatically gets rid of the white bars on the sides of the pictures in the above image, so I could avoid having to manually change menu settings for hundreds of objects. I’m not going to go into any more of the technical details of Unity, but suffice it to say that my background is in studio art and I figured it, so you can too (or at least some techy-ish person at your institution can).
- So I’ll wrap up here...
- And leave you with a few thoughts and questions that came up during this process that I’m thinking about now as I consider how our department might continue with projects like this going forward. First, scalability: how would we do a project like this for example on a regular basis, with a larger class, or with different kinds of collections? Related to this, I want to identify areas where student workers can be more hands-on, in the same way that right now student workers do defined scanning and cataloging jobs. So, basically, defining parts of this work that are the right skill level for that. Another move toward scalability would be to continue to automate the time consuming organizational parts of this process, I‘ve even thought that it could be useful to create sort of an open-source library or a plugin for Unity along these lines, like a “virtual gallery toolkit” Lastly, there are affordances specific to virtual space that could be incorporated into projects like this. We went pretty literal in a way in the way we replicated a physical space, but in virtual space the laws of physics don’t really need to apply, for example. Navigation through the space could happen in any number of ways. There are also certainly gameplay elements that could be incorporated to tell a story in a more interactive way, like the user needing to collect objects or complete a task of some kind, in a way that would be relevant to the content that’s being presented. So, the possibilities are really endless, although obviously time and resources aren’t, as I’m sure you all know.
- So that’s it for me. Please feel free to ask any questions you might have during the question session, or you’re always welcome to email me if you have any thoughts or questions.