Yorkshire’s Jurassic World, The Yorkshire Museum

Yorkshire’s Jurassic World is a major new exhibition designed by Bright White Ltd for York Museums Trust. It tells the remarkable story of Yorkshire's dramatically changing landscape and of the creatures that inhabited it millions of years ago.

Digital augmentation can help us to find meaning in difficult-to-interpret fossil specimens and within the gallery can be found two ColliderCases, interpreting very different objects, each with their own display challenges.

The second contains the footprints of a two-legged therapod. The ColliderCase places a life size holographic dinosaur into the space, stepping into the actual footprints as it walks across the trackway. The digital interpretation is object-led, but the layer of digital media really brings the trace fossil to life by creating a vignette of a time, a place and a creature.

American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo 2017

St Louis, Missouri

The Museums and Heritage Show 2017

London, UK

We were delighted to be invited to showcase ColliderCase at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo 2017 in St Louis. The Alliance represents more than 35,000 museum professionals, volunteers, institutions, and corporate partners serving the museum field.

ColliderCase technology is brilliantly suited to the interpretation of natural history collections. In order to demonstrate how the technology can be applied to natural history subjects we chose to interpret a replica fossil from the Upper Jurassic period. The fossilised insect is part of a superfamily of dragonflies called Aeshnoidea.

The interpretation demonstrates the striking similarities in the features of the ancient insect to those of the dragonflies we see today. A child-friendly picture book style was chosen for this exhibit, however the content could be segmented to effectively provide for different audiences, enabling for example, both a natural history buff and a primary aged student to be catered for in the same space.

The anatomy of the dark fossil is traced in light and clearly labelled. Photographs describe in microscopic detail how the eyes of the ancient insects might have looked and short videos show slow motion footage of the complex way that a dragonfly’s four wings interact, allowing it to hover and change direction with great accuracy.

The viewer watches as a flurry of insects fills the screen. By giving us the insect’s perspective, ColliderCase demonstrates the dragonfly’s remarkable ability to target a single insect in a swarm, illustrating beautifully why this is one of the most successful lifeforms on the planet.

Visitors can remain focused on the specimen while it 'changes' before their eyes. As the final trick, the luminous colours of the ancient insect are reimagined the dragonfly emerges in 3D from the matrix, performs a hovering spin, then flutters towards the viewer.

Yorkshire’s Jurassic World, The Yorkshire Museum

Yorkshire’s Jurassic World is a major new exhibition designed by Bright White Ltd for York Museums Trust. It tells the remarkable story of Yorkshire's dramatically changing landscape and of the creatures that inhabited it millions of years ago.

Digital augmentation can help us to find meaning in difficult-to-interpret fossil specimens and within the gallery can be found two ColliderCases, interpreting very different objects, each with their own display challenges.

The first is a fantastic piece from the York Museum’s Trust collection. The fossil was discovered by Martin Rigby in 2015 in Saltwick Bay, near Whitby. It contains a secret, hidden in time. The fossilised ribs of an ichthyosaur, a type of Sea Dragon, are well defined, however the real significance of this rare and beautiful piece might be easily missed by the untrained eye. It contains the unborn embryos of the ichthyosaur and the digital interpretation highlights the vertebrae of each individual dragon baby.

Culloden Battlefield and Visitor Centre, Scotland

The very first ColliderCase was installed at Culloden Battlefield and Visitor Centre in November 2016. It displays letters from Charles Edward Stuart to King Louis XV. 

The letters, which had never been exhibited before, are dated 5th November 1746. Written just 7 months after his infamous defeat the Battle of Culloden, the letters give a rare and fascinating insight into the psychology of the Prince during one of the most frantic and pivotal periods of his life.

The Centre wanted to explore the potential of ColliderCase technology to showcase their new acquisitions in an imaginative and compelling way. They were keen to experiment with the innovative storytelling techniques that ColliderCase offers. The aim was to consider what the letters reveal about Charles whilst placing them in the context of the wider narrative of the battle.

The visitor watches as the ancient french script on the original document glows, delicately highlighting a passage of text, before the illuminated section is temporarily ‘replaced’ with an accessible translation in the visitor’s language of choice. The case at Culloden has seven different language options in addition to large print and audio description.

ColliderCase technology enables this visual transformation to take place. Allowing the visitor to view the letters and scrutinise their meaning without once needing to look away from the precious documents themselves.

The inbuilt sensor within the case allowed the museum to analyse and understand how effectively its message was communicating with visitors. It took account of visits, unique visits, engagement time, party size, age and gender. Six months after the letters first went on display the content was remotely updated based on the results of the visitor data.

In the updated media, the dense language of the direct translations was simplified and the content of each paragraph was captured in a summary to convey the tone and intent of Charles’s original script in a more accessible way. Should the viewer wish to access the translation in full along with additional interpretation this is possible at the conclusion of the updated, more succinct initial sequence.

The Collidercase at Culloden has brought these intriguing letters into the public eye for the first time and displayed them in a way that enhances the story of Culloden, painting an ever more captivating picture of this already complex character through the careful examination of his own words.

The National Holocaust Centre and Museum, UK

Leon Greenman OBE was the only Englishman to be imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp. During the Holocaust, he endured numerous camps and a 60 mile death march. Leon lost his wife and young son during the Holocaust. He vowed that should he survive he would dedicate his life to ensuring such events would never happen again. 

‘Greenman changed people's lives with his words. For him, the camps and the fight against racism was not a history lesson but rather a battle for today to prevent a repeat of history.’  - The Independent

The Leon Greenman Gallery at the National Holocaust Centre not only honours and commemorates his many years of dedication to Holocaust education, but hopes to continue it. In the Gallery we are introduced to Leon’s story, the powerful lessons he drew from his experience and his determination to share these lessons with the world.

At the centre of the gallery is a Collidercase containing five individual stones. The viewer hears an audio recording of Leon from a 1945 interview describing his ordeal. Glass then appears to shatter in slow-motion within the case, visually referencing an appalling act of violence experienced by Leon almost 50 years later.

In 1994 a brick was thrown through the window of his home in London, and minutes later, a message was left at the local paper threatening his life. Undeterred in his fight against racism, Leon kept the brick. It is displayed alongside pebbles he subsequently collected from each of the camps in which he was imprisoned - stones he invited into his home, and stones he did not. These objects are presented in the Collidercase and their significance and symbolism sensitively expressed through the digital interpretation.

W.M. Keck Earth Science and Mineral Engineering Museum

University of Nevada, Reno, USA

The ColliderCase system is doing great. It has been a big hit here...

- Garrett Barmore, Museum Curator

Cody’s Wyoming Coal Company Certificate signed by Wm F. Cody (Buffalo Bill)

The certificate displayed in this ColliderCase belonged to William F. Cody, in his time the most famous American in the world and better known to us as Buffalo Bill.

Cody invested his money in many projects and he also required cash from investors to start producing products and making profits. These investments were recorded using Stock Certificates. The certificate displayed in this ColliderCase names Cody as the owner of the shares, and he has also signed it as the President of the company.

Due to the age of the document the signatures are very faint and difficult to discern. The ColliderCase digitally traces over Cody’s original writing, defining the faded script without having any detrimental effect on the delicate paper.

Because of the value and importance of these documents the best printing techniques of the time were used to create them, a decorative printing technique called guilloché. The etchings used to print the certificates were purposefully intricate and complex to deter counterfeiters.

The designs are so elaborate that the true extent of the detail is difficult to see with the naked eye. High resolution scans of the document were taken so that the illustrations could be digitally magnified beside the original, meaning the symbolism and design detail can be fully appreciated.

This ColliderCase had dual functionality, as well as being a display in it’s own right the certificate acted as a taster for an upcoming exhibition, to excite and inform potential visitors about it, and once open, to direct and entice them towards the full exhibit.

The ColliderCase gives the option of an audio-track or large-type version for improved accessibility should this be desired.

DATACITY PARIS & DIGIMUSE SINGAPORE

In 2015 the City of York was designated as a UNESCO City of Media Arts. DATACITY is a three month exhibition at the Centre des Arts, Enghien-les-Bains, Paris, showing works from each of the 9 UNESCO Media Arts Creative Cities around the world.

Part of the remit for the Data Cities exhibition was to showcase ‘digital devices and tools of tomorrow’, a perfect fit for a ColliderCase augmented reality system.

The installation, entitled Of York Minster, weaves a variety of stories and storytelling tools together into a single hologram-like presentation. Our completed artwork combines real fragments of historic stone, metal and glass sourced from the Minster, and shavings of wood and wire collected from craft workshops involved in the current renovations. These fragments form the ‘seed’ from which the digital content unfolds.

This combination of physical objects and virtual content represents a visual metaphor for the solid, built heritage of the city, and the more intangible aspects that breathe life into that architecture, creating and completing the city’s identity. The dramatic yet gentle storytelling effect would not be possible without the amazing ColliderCase technology.

The digital content was conceived as an animated performance piece. As the viewer witnesses a sequential unfolding, or development of the city, an interwoven tapestry of images and text is revealed, with the latter building through the duration of the work to form a poem. On completion, the virtual content ‘folds’ itself back up and disappears, leaving the fragments on display and bringing the attention back to the central seed of the Minster.

The work was also exhibited at the National Museum of Singapore, where it was on display alongside AR and VR installations for the fantastic DigiMuse initiative. Of York Minster will be on display at the Museums and Heritage Show 2018 at Olympia, London.