Week 7: Niamh, Ruta, Yan

Niamh, Ruta and Yan spoke about the role of technology in supporting art and cultural heritage experiences.

The Presentation

Ruta went first and she spoke about the role technology in art and museum space. How it’s changing the way art is made and displayed and overall how does it change the experience. She gave a brief history and showed examples of museum that have gone digital and how it has affected the footfall. She spoke about the Cleveland Museum of Art and showed some fascinating interactive art pieces. She then showed examples from the Artlens gallery and their work. Lastly she spoke about and lead a discussion about the role of technology and how it can enhance the experience in the museum.

Niamh spoke about the role of AR in supporting culture and heritage. She gave a history of the very first uses of AR used which included NASA and some other artists ranging from 1968 to 1999.

She then spoke about how AR has gone from a sci-fi technology we see in movies to everyone’s pockets in the form of Pokemon go and many virtual gaming experiences. She then introduced us to Adobe Aero which is adobes latest software to help artists build AR experiences. She gave examples of AR experiences built using aero and I was truly fascinated seeing how much impact it can have. AR definitely helps the user have a better experience as it puts them at the centre.

Lastly, Yan spoke about the art and technology outside the museum space. He showed examples from Paris, Tokyo and Dubai exhibits and spoke about art exhibits that makeup use of projection mapping.

The Workshop

As usual after a short break we all moved to the workshop. This week I was with Michelle, Chidi and Chenxi.

Our briefing packet included fun facts about our scenario and the main brief. Our brief has a controversial history. It was about redesigning the experience of Sir Mickael Terence Wogan, better known as Terry Wogan who was an Irish TV and radio broadcaster. It mentioned that Terry fans and in general the people of Limerick were unhappy after the sculpture of him turned out to not too identical and cost €58,500. Using the technology provided in the briefing pack, we were asked to redesign the Terry Wogan statues experience for tourists visiting the city for the first time.

Our box had VR in it so we had to make sure we have an element of AR in our final solution. After a little bit of brainstorming and finalising the idea we started looking for materials to prototype. Our final idea was to build upon what Terry Wogan meant to people. The experience would be such that the user would come in and use a kiosk to take on the VR headset. As they wore the headset a graphical version of Terry would come to them and ask them to draw what they feel Terry looked like. Since the outrage within people was about the fact his statue didn’t look like him. We wanted to give people a chance to show what was their image of Terry Wogan. We decided that after the person is done with their sculpture an image of that would be displayed on the digital screen behind Terry which keeps a track of all the sculptures created by the public and creates a collage of them. We also thought that the best sculpture could be the design which can be used to redo the current one. Giving public a chance to show their ideas.

It was fun learning about art and how technology is changing the art exhibit space. Museums happen to be the epicentre of that change and designing for one of those scenarios was exciting and great for a change.

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