The Museum of Pure Form: touching real statues in an immersive virtual museum

In the Museum of Pure Form, we explore a novel way of presenting art to visitors of a museum, allowing them to virtually touch artefacts in a virtual museum. In order to realise this the statues are first digitised with a scanner so that they can be placed in a virtual museum. The virtual museum is then displayed on a 3D stereo screen. The visitor uses a purpose-built two-contact-point haptic device, mounted on an exoskeleton, to explore the shape of a piece of art which the visitor would otherwise be forbidden to touch in a conventional museum. We have tested such an installation in a CAVE-like system. The results show that the users are in favour of using a haptic device in this context. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.8 [Computer Graphics]: Applications, H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces, J.5 [Computer Applications]: Arts and Humanities.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: VAST
• Authors: Céline Loscos, Franco Tecchia, Antonio Frisoli, Marcello Carrozzino, Hila Ritter Widenfeld, David Swapp, Massimo Bergamasco
• Keywords: Haptic Device, Two-contact-point Haptic Device, VAST 2004, Virtual Museum, Virtual Reality