Pop-Up Museum: Digital Display Case

Combining the latest sensor and image capture technology a team from the UCL Environmental, Geomatic and Civil Engineering department bring you the Pop-up Museum. The exhibit allows visitors a hands on experience with objects and artefacts from the Grant Museum of Zoology and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology.

Visitors can handle 3D printed versions of the museum objects, these are synchronised to a 3D replica in the Digital Display case that will replicate the movement of the 3D print. Factoids and images will pop up on the screen allowing people to learn about the object and explore different features. A game is made of exploring the object to find all of the facts. The sound and visuals for each digital museum object reflect dynamically adapt to reflect their historical contexts. 

This installation was developed for the UCL200 Bicentennial Celebrations and exhibited at the UCL Object Learning Lab in conjunction with UCL Special Collections during the Launch Event. 

Developed by the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering in Partnership/collaboration with UCL's Grant Museum of Zoology and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Achaeology

How it works:

The system can be split into three parts: the physical objects, the sensing of the objects and then the display! 

3D Objects:

Over the years, the UCL Museums have 3D scanned a number of their collection artifacts for numerous reasons from scientific projects to digitisation drives. These objects are scanned using a number of different techniques often resulting in a very high quality, highly detailed 3D mesh model which we were given to process. Our team processed these 3D models into lighter-weight versions while retaining detail in order for us to use within the game display, but also to enable the 3D printing of the objects in-house. With public engagement, we decided a softer material would be safer and so we used a flexible material called "TPU" to manufacturer the objects. A challenge was retaining the shape and scale of the object while being able to fit our sensing electronics on the inside!  

Motion Sensing:

To enable the sensing of motion, our installation embeds inertial measurement units (IMUs) into each of the 3D printed objects! IMUs are tiny sensors which can sense accelerations of an object - both rotational and directional. Together with an embedded gyroscope and compass, these measurements can be used to calculate the motion of the objects. We use a little chip called the CodeCell which embeds an IMU with a Wi-Fi chip enabling the communication to the main computer! An interesting challenge was linking the rotation given by the IMU to the real location and orientation of the installation - the IMU rotation is resolved into an orientation with the compass which is a magnetometer - aligning itself with the earth's magnetic field - leading to an interesting calibration step we had to add to represent the orientation of the installation relative to the world! 

Digital Display Case:

Linking to the display, we built the "game display" in the Unity Game Engine. Unity gives a bunch of useful tools to enable the development of 3D user interfaces which otherwise we would have to build ourselves. With Unity, we could include the 3D mesh models given by the museums straight into the game. The rest of the challenge was developing a satisfying, intuitive and fun experience in exploring the objects, integrating interesting object facts from the museums. The dioramas you see mecahnically loading in add to the object context. The See-Through-Display concept links to previous CA::VE work where we want to explore interactions between participants, encouraging emergent experiences, and enabling the illusion that you are interaction inside a 3D display case - and not just a screen!