Margot BERNSTEIN
(Columbia University, New York, USA)
Keywords: Session: The State of 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage in the Age of Augmented Reality, Xbox Kinect, UAVs, and the Oculus Rift
Abstract:
Museums around the world have begun to question whether they can or should maintain their period rooms. This paper asks how digital technologies can preserve period rooms and transform our knowledge of their contents by digitally re-imagining one of the great eighteenth-century French period rooms in the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
In virtual period rooms, visitors are invited to engage with the objects and people that occupied and enlivened these interiors. High resolution details and interactive, rotational 3D models of eighteenth-century objects—be they pieces of furniture, lighting fixtures, or dinnerware fashioned from native or exotic woods, an assortment of fabrics, powder pink porcelain, lacquer, and more—offer unprecedented insight into the creation, decoration, and display of the first modern domestic interiors. Virtual period rooms, moreover, can be digitally populated with the artisans who furnished such spaces, the wealthy people who inhabited them, and the servants who served the wealthy. Video clips from period films, a recent digitized model of an eighteenth-century game table created and presented to the public by the Metropolitan Museum, and high resolution photographs of objects whose complicated configurations and lavish decoration are either hidden from or inaccessible to museum visitors, all have the potential to re-present period rooms as never before.