Geelong Digital Outdoor Museum (GDOM) - Photogrammetry as the Surface for a Portable Museum

Abstract

This paper presents the development and evaluation of the Geelong Digital Outdoor Museum (GDOM) prototype accessible at https://gdom.mindlab.cloud. GDOM is a portable museum-our novel adaptation of the distributed museum model (Stuedahl & Lowe, 2013) which uses mobile devices to present museum collections attached to physical sites. Our prototype defines a way for intangible heritage associated with tangible landscapes to be accessible via personal digital devices using 360° 3D scanned digital replicas of physical landscapes (photogrammetric digital models). Our work aligns with efforts set out in the UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) to safeguard cultural and natural heritage, by openly disseminating the heritage of physical sites seamlessly through the landscape. Using a research by design methodology we delivered our prototype as a modular webbased platform that leveraged the Matterport digital model platform. We qualitatively evaluated the prototype's usability and future development opportunities with 32 front-end users and 13 potential stakeholders. We received a wide gamut of responses that included: users feeling empowered by the greater accessibility, users finding a welcome common ground with comparable physical experiences, and users and potential stakeholders seeing the potential to re-create physical world experiences with modifications to the digital model along with on-site activation. Our potential stakeholders suggested ways in which GDOM could be integrated into the arts, education, and tourism to widen its utility and applicability. In future we see design potential in breaking out of the static presentation of the digital model and expanding our portable museum experience to work on-site as a complement to the remote experience. However, we recognise the way in which on-site activation integrate into users' typical activities can be tangential (McGookin et al., 2019) and this would necessitate further investigation into how to best integrate the experience on-site.