Museums have more objects in storage than they do on show, which means exhibitions come and go, even long-standing ones have to say goodbye at some point. But it's no longer the case that when they disappear the space they once occupied is gone for good. Now it can live on, digitally.Last year London's Science Museum closed their Shipping Galleries, opened in 1963, which housed their collection of maritime artefacts, 1,800 objects in total. But rather than bidding it farewell for good, they decided to create a 3D point cloud model of the space before they packed everything up to be housed in the museum's storage facilities.
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Sections of a 3D point cloud model of the Science Museum’s shipping galleriesThe task fell to ScanLAB Projects, who use 3D scanning technology to create "millimetre perfect 3D dataset of objects, buildings and landscapes."—and for this project they recorded an immense amount of data: "Two billion precise laser measurements were recorded from 275 laser scans of the galleries" the museum website states, with the aim being to release the raw data set publicly later this year. If there's any Occulus Rift developers out there, maybe they could do something interesting?
A 3D point cloud image of the Science Museum shipping galleriesIn the video above transport curator for the museum David Rooney takes you on a guided tour of this digital ghost space. However, unless you're mad keen on your maritime history, you might find the full seven minutes a little overlong. But what's impressive to see is these former galleries brought alive so accurately, as the tour glides around the space, taking in models of ships and floating past exhibition cabinets—and although it features quite a lot of info, the video is just 10% of the data they recorded.It might not be the same as physically walking through the galleries, but it shows that with technology it's possible to resurrect exhibitions which no longer exist.
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