The Canadian Museum of Civilization Virtualizes Reality!Hull, Quebec, 29 May 1997 — A new exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC), The 3rd Dimension: A New Way of Seeing in Cyberspace, beams visitors into the future by means of virtualized reality.
The 3rd Dimension showcases the most sophisticated 3-D colour laser digitizer ever developed — the COLORSCAN by Hymarc Ltd. of Ottawa — as it digitizes, transmits and interactively displays full-colour, three-dimensional virtual models of approximately 500 CMC artifacts. For museum enthusiasts, this revolutionary technology means that access to priceless collections from the comforts of home is in the forseeable future. The virtual collection hovers on the horizon.
The ability to create accurate virtual models, when combined with the apparently infinite possibilities of the Internet, is a major breakthrough in making rare and fragile museum artifacts accessible to vast numbers of people. As image databases develop, museum-surfers with Internet connections will have access to the collections of museums from around the world. And, aside from being able to see full 3-D colour images of artifacts, they will be able to examine and manipulate them at will.
According to Dr. George F. MacDonald, President and CEO of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation, the virtual museum is about to become a reality. "In many ways, the technology has surpassed expectations. We are a giant step closer to making our vast collections and exhibition and research materials accessible to people throughout the world. We are fulfilling our mandate of becoming a museum without walls," he states.
In The 3rd Dimension, the actual process of three dimensional imaging is on display. But visitors can do much more than witness technicians as they scan and digitize Museum artifacts — they can also interact with the images in the 3-D display station, rotating, panning and zooming in on specifc features of full stereoscopic 3-D colour images and compare them to the real thing.
The COLORSCAN is the first colour camera in the world that captures the shape and colour of object surfaces simultaneously. This unique made-in- Canada technology uses RGB (red, green, blue) laser projection and the Synchronized Scanning optical architecture developed by the National Research Council Canada (NRC) to capture images. A Silicon Graphics workstation is then used in conjunction with software developed jointly by NRC, the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI), InnovMetric Software and Hymarc Ltd. to generate high-resolution 3-D models for display on a large Electrohome projector.
The CMC is the main demonstration site for the digitizing and display system. To demonstrate the system's remote access capability, images will be transmitted over local and national Test Networks to the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, which has a mini-theatre and interactive display station that will provide visitors there, as of July, the same interactive access to the digitized images as is available to CMC visitors!
The 3rd Dimension was developed and produced by the CMC in partnership with NRC and Hymarc Ltd. under the auspices of the AMUSE (Geographic Independent Access to MUSEums) project sponsored in part by CANARIE Inc. (Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education). Technology developers include NRC, Hymarc Ltd. and InnovMetric Software, and equipment partners include Silicon Graphics Canada, Electrohome Limited and Carl Zeiss, Inc.
The 3rd Dimension: A New Way of Seeing in Cyberspace is on display at the CMC in the William E. Taylor Research Gallery from May 29, 1997 to May 24, 1998.
Information (media):
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