YEAR
2022
CLIENT
Thackray Museum of Medicine
DELIVERABLES
Thumbnails, Social Posts
OVERVIEW
The award-winning Thackray Museum of Medicine hosts galleries chronicling medical history and advancements. I collaborated with them to create Apothecary Stories, a mobile app that enhances an exhibition space with augmented reality and audio, and context for educational exploration.
The Problem
The Thackray Museum of Medicine challenged me to design a mobile web application, which would allow visitors to better engage with and re-evaluate their interpretations of the Apothecary Jars housed within an exhibition. The goal was to incorporate multimedia content, including 3D models and audio interpretations, to heighten visitors understanding and engagement.
It was crucial to ensure the application integrated into the existing museum brand, enabling visitors to feel the experience was harmonious and accessible.
Custom iconography and an application logo were designed in a visual style that matched the wider marketing visuals throughout the space.
Gaining a new perspective
Users could augment and view select exhibits from the apothecary shop exhibition via a smartphone. These assets are based on 3D models, which were scanned and reconstructed using photogrammetry techniques.
Exhibits could be manipulated both within the museum space and also at home, enabling prospective museum visitors to sample the Thackray Museum before they came to visit.
Features
Apothecary Stories
AR Models
Pulling from API's from Apple, visitors could interact with the exhibit models directly in their mobile browser, without the need to download a native application.
Textual / Audio Content
Visitors could gauge further context and awareness about apothecaries' usage, through audio extracts recorded by museum volunteers.
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AR Content within a browser
Access and instantly augment a selection of apothecary jar exhibits without downloading an application. Apothecary Stories relies on web based API's to load up AR content on both iOS and Android devices.
Medical application at a glance
Branded iconography features across each apothercary exhibit page, providing visitors with visual an learn and gain further context about the apothecary vessels and their medical usage through audio descriptions recorded by volunteers at the Thackray Museum of Medicine.
Textual and Audio provide further clarity and detail!
Visitors can gain further context about the apothecary vessels and their usage through audio descriptions recorded by volunteers at the Thackray Museum of Medicine.
Development
Because the core brand identity of the Thackray Museum was already established, development concepts were focused on collecting examples of AR integration in museums and cultural spaces.
Exhibits were placed on a turntable and dozens of photographs were captured to build a complete 3D image. Using photogrammetry software, the images were converted into a 3D model, before being compressed and further treated in Blender.
The challenge was to balance the realistic proportions and detail of each exhibit, whilst keeping file sizes to a minimum to ensure there were minimal loading times when viewing the 3D models within the application.
Impact
Beyond my dissertation, additional work was conducted to deliver a working prototype, which was ready for distribution in the museum space.
This sample application contained 8 artefact entries, with the opportunity to scale beyond to encapsulate even more of the Apothecary Shop exhibition.
