Research Collaboration Gives Museum Visitors X-Ray Vision

Have you ever wished you could see through surfaces? This is now possible at the German Maritime Museum (DSM), thanks to the results of a research collaboration involving the IWM. The special exhibition 'SEH-STÜCKE - Maritimes digital entdeckt' now allows visitors to look inside 24 historical artefacts, including a box sextant, elaborately decorated sperm whale teeth and old medicine pills from ship's pharmacies, using state-of-the-art technology.

The exhibition presents key findings from the joint project 'Digital Materialities. Virtual and Analogue Forms of Exhibition' (DigiMat), a collaboration between DSM, the Leibniz Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) and the MAPEX Centre for Materials and Processes at the University of Bremen. Funded by the Senate Science Committee of the Leibniz Association, the exhibition uses X-ray images, similar to those used in medicine or airport security checks, generated by a 3D X-ray microscope at MAPEX.
 
Floating digital replicas

As visitors explore the exhibition, the physical exhibits are displayed on the outside wall of an oversized black box. Inside, digital replicas - 3D models - float as holograms in the dark. A dedicated media station offers detailed insights into each exhibit.

"The 'Digimat' project dispels the notion that the original and the virtual are opposites. Materiality and digitality can stimulate learning processes and open up insights that wouldn't be possible with the original object alone or through data visualisation on a screen," says Prof. Dr. Stephan Schwan, head of the IWM’s Realistic Representations research lab.  

Differing experiences

For Schwan and his team, understanding the learning processes behind visitors’ engagement with objects and their digital counterparts in a museum setting is particularly fascinating. The three previous experimental exhibitions at the IWM, both on-site and online, presented 3D models of objects using different technologies (video, tablet, Hololens). The researchers studied how this affected visitors’ learning, experience, and behaviour. The research showed that visitors perceived different potentials in the original objects compared to their 3D models. These findings are now being tested in the current DSM exhibition and will inform the design of future exhibits.