Cyber-Physical Museum Exhibits Based on Additive Technologies, Tangible Interfaces and Scientific Visualization

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the new methods of organizing interactive museum exhibits by means of additive technologies, programmable microelectronics and multimedia. Traditionally museum exhibition is distanced from the visitor appearing just as a visual image. But new trend is to let the visitor inside the exhibition, providing different forms of interactions. Modern museums constantly search for the new ways of presenting cultural and natural heritage taking into account that exhibitions should be at the same time scientifically accurate, attractive, memorable and, ideally, accessible for the wide audience including disabled people. In this regard, tangible user interfaces based on the Internet of Things and combined with the scientific visualization build up very promising set of technologies that brings to live cyberphysical museum exhibits. These exhibits are an alloy of physical museum items with virtual multimedia content, providing the visitor a unique experience of interactivity. The key feature of cyber-physical exhibits is their tangibility, whereby they become accessible for visually impaired people and deliver much more information for the regular visitors. There are a lot of successful attempts to build cyber-physical exhibits within the museum space. However, there is a lack of methodological basis for this, as well as the lack of highlevel tools to seamlessly integrate related technologies into the existing museum infrastructure. In this paper we propose using ontology-driven adaptive multiplatform scientific visualization system SciVi as a software basis for cyber-physical museum exhibits. This system was previously successfully used in solving problems related to steering hardware and software solvers in different application domains, monitoring lightweight robotics systems and supporting custom hardware human-machine interfaces. So, it contains necessary mechanisms to adapt to the third-party digital infrastructure (including the museum one) and build all the required middleware and visualizers within it. We tested our approach by developing two cyber physical exhibits: tangible bonobo skull in the State Darwin Museum (Moscow) and tangible titanophone skulls in the Museum of Permian Antiquities (Perm). Bonobo exhibit appears to be a custom joystick in a form of corresponding skull to steer the Sketchfab-rendered 3D model of bonobo monkey head. Titanophone exhibit allows visitors to discover the age variability of titanophone synapsid in an interactive way.

Ontology-Driven Visual Analytics Platform for Semantic Data Mining and Fuzzy Classification

“…In our previous work, we reconstructed skull 3D models of young and adult Titanophoneus potens Efremov, 1938 individuals based on real fossils. Then we used SciVi to create a cyber-physical exhibit for a paleontological museum [21]. This exhibit demonstrates the ontogenesis of the Titanophoneus as a linear morphing from young to adult.…”

Scientific Visualization System on a Chip with Tangible User Interface

“…Next, we proposed a set of technologies to automate creation of custom TUI to solve particular scientific visualization tasks within SciVi [17]. Finally, we applied the developed methods and means in museum application domain to automate creation of interactive exhibits based on scientific visualization and Internet of Things (IoT) [18].…”

“…SciVi scientific visualization platform provides efficient tools to automate all the main steps of creating the interactive exhibits [18]:…”

“…The previous work of creating IoT-based museum exhibits was been focused on utilizing programmable MCUs [18], which (in combination with different sensors and actuators) can be used as a hardware basis of TUI. However the MCUs are unable to perform data rendering due to the low performance, so the image synthesis should take place elsewhere, for example, on a kiosk with a full-fledged computer, or on the visitors' mobile devices.…”

“…However the MCUs are unable to perform data rendering due to the low performance, so the image synthesis should take place elsewhere, for example, on a kiosk with a full-fledged computer, or on the visitors' mobile devices. While this is a viable scenario (that was, for example, implemented in practice in the State Darwin Museum, Moscow, Russia [18]), sometimes having an external rendering device is not an option. First of all, relaying on just the visitors' mobile devices is considered a bad practice, since some of the visitors may have no required gadgets or may be unable to use them in a way desired in an exhibition.…”