Overview
The Thackray Museum of Medicine is an award-winning museum home housing a host of galleries, chronicling the history of medicine and advances in medicine. Working with the organisation, I created a mobile application called Apothecary Stories to enhance one of their exhibition spaces with augmented reality, audio and textual content, as part of an educational exploration piece of work.
Gaining a new perspective
Users could augment and view select exhibits from the apothecary shop exhibition using a compatible smartphone. These assets are based on 3D models, which I scanned and reconstructed using photogrammetry techniques. Exhibits could be manipulated both within the museum space and also at home, enabling propspective museum visitors to sample the Thackray Museum before they came to visit.
AR Content with no app download required!
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.
Research
At the inception of the project, I began by analysing how visitors were engaging with the exhibition to gain a broad understanding of the user experience.. Further user interviews, allowed me to identify pain points and pin point key areas to focus on and improve with Apothecary Stories.
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 exhibits in AR.
Testing & Exploration
A period of research, exploration and testing was conducted for this project, as I explored different concepts and design ideas. This included experimenting with virtual personas, who would introduce the museum exhibition in augmented reality and provide further context for visitors. Some ideas were not developed further due to time and budget constraints.
Outcome
Beyond my final dissertation, additional work was conducted to deliver a sample application which was ready for distribution in the museum space. This sample application contained 8 artefact entires, with the opportunity to scale beyond to encapsulate even more of the Apothecary Shop exhibition.
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.
The Challenge
The Thackray Museum of Medicine challenged me to produce a creative solution, which would allow visitors to better engage with and reevaluate 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.
Client
Thackray Musuem
Date
2022
Role
Designer
Apothecary Stories: Museum Application
