Accessing rare objects through virtual and augmented realities

Using cutting-edge scanning and virtual reality technology, an exhibition by an archaeology PhD student reconceptualized how rare artifacts are displayed and how audiences can interact with them.

Craig Stevens mounted Augmented Curiosities: Virtual Play in African Pasts and Futures in spring quarter with the help of Esmeralda Kale, the George and Mary LeCron Foster Curator of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies—and aided by the technical expertise of Northwestern Information Technology’s media and technology innovation team.

The physical display in the Herskovits Library consisted of six artifacts, ranging from a brass-and-wood pipe from the Nuna people of Burkina Faso and Ghana to a souvenir fan from the 1951 election of Liberian president William Tolbert. Though those items were exhibited behind locked glass, visitors had two ways to approach and examine them:

• For an augmented reality experience, a QR code next to each object allowed exhibit attendees to use their mobile devices (or a provided tablet) to access and manipulate a digital representation of the artifact. They could resize these representations, turn them, and even look underneath to see an artist’s signature that otherwise would have been obscured.
• Alternatively, visitors could don a virtual reality headset and use a pair of handheld wands to fully immerse themselves in a virtual world where they could open the cabinet doors, pick up the objects, and manipulate them as if really holding them.

Stevens saw an opportunity to use AR and VR technology to create more-accessible experiences. “Most exhibitions add value to an object by making it inaccessible, putting it behind a pane of glass, telling you how old it is, how fragile it is,” Stevens said. “But exhibits could preserve that and still allow for intimate engagement.”

Stevens pointed out the fragility of a Yoruban statuette carved from a single block of wood and decorated with beads and blue pigment. “This was the first object I selected, because I knew that you cannot touch it. If you touch that blue, it’s on your finger,” Stevens said. “I really wanted to digitize this, because it would be powerful for people to be able to ‘touch’ it.”