3-D(igitization)

In-between battles with ABBY FineReader's spell checker and debates about copyright in the digitization sphere, I've been musing about another area of digicreativity that sparks my imagination: the digitization of 3-D objects. The whole challenge of representing a 3-D object in two dimensions--and using digital technologies to somehow make the viewer's experience of the digitized object even richer (or rich in different ways) than the viewer's experience of the original object--strikes me as a delicious challenge. But also an insanely expensive one, and maybe, depending on the object, an unnecessary one. But, if done right, could the digitization of 3-D objects enhance access in a genuinely satisfying way? In digitization scenarios, how can we mimic tactile sensation by enabling users to explore texture and dimension in unprecedented ways? So much of the museum experience is about the do not touch. Could we break this barrier through digitization?

One of Khrushchev's treasures in the Kennedy Digital Archives.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum's Digital Archives offers one model of 3-D object digitization. Click here to zoom in on the 19th-century drinking horn that Nikita Krushchev gifted to Kennedy (hmm...what was the political backstory here? that seems to be missing from the metadata). The close-up visual tour is aesthetically pleasing, but does it take you beyond the experience you'd get when peering through a glass case at the Museum?

According to this blog post, the digital folks at the Smithsonian Institution are actively pursuing 3-D digitization plans for their collections. The idea of using digitization and 3-D imaging to enlarge an object visitors have trouble seeing with the naked eye seems promising and particularly useful, but I'm not sure about this "Infamous Blue Beetle," who has crawled to a new digital home on Facebook. The concurrent rise of the digitization of 3-D objects with the soaring popularity of born-digital 3-D modeling and 3-D printing may bode well for the affordability of such digitization efforts in the near future.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History manages to approach the concept of "touch" in their 3D Collection: by holding down the left-click button on the mouse, you can "touch" and rotate the objects to make them mirror the movement of your cursor--even this little 27,000-year-old Fired Clay Bison, unearthed in the Czech Republic. Being able to manipulate the object with your finger would take the "touch" experience even further: I wonder if these images are viewable on a touch-sensitive tablet computer. Has anybody made a Please Do Not Touch! app for iPad?

When I stumble upon further examples of digitization projects involving 3-D objects, I'll add them here.