A contact-free interactive gestural interface to view and investigate 3d models of artists books. Presented at the “Long Sunday” of the Swiss National Library, October 18th 2015″
The Swiss National Library has the mission to collect objects made by swiss artists and make these collections available to the public. Some of the objects are extremely fragile, e.g. the chocolate cake by Daniele Robbiani. Part of it is made of real chocolate that would melt and be destroyed when exhibited. That’s the motivation for a pilot project investigating the possibilities of 3d digitization, “virtual” touch and gestural interaction.
The 3d models that can be manipulated are digitized by the photo lab team of the library using a custom photogrammetry process. This way, a high quality of representation can be achieved. In an interative design process, I created an interactive installation to “experience” these objects without touching them. It’s a gamification of museum exhibits.
The installation is using a large venue projection (approx. 8.5m x 4.5m), a gaming notebook a Microsoft Kinect v2 sensor. Unity3d was used to create the visualization and game experience. A person walking in the room can do a virtual walk towards or around the object. More detailed and precise exploration can be done with hand gestures (zoom and rotation). Suitable gestures were found using iterative UX testing with unbiased test people.
Together with the touchless installation, the visitors of the exposition did have the possibility to use tablet stations to explore the same objects with touch An interactive 3d object viewer is available for the web (WebGL, also suited for tablets and mobile phones).
