August 21, 2019
One opportunity the Blended Reality team was excited to work with recently was the need for some way to “capture” the Peabody museum dioramas digitally for the upcoming year long renovation which will close off the exhibits from the public. On August 12, working with Exhibit Preparator Michael Anderson, the Blended Reality team – Director Randall Rode, interdisciplinary artists Justin Berry and Bobby Berry, photographer and video artist Seth Wenger, lighting design artist Joey Moro, and finally interns Farid Abdul and Maxwell Lovell, all set out to test different methods of capturing the dioramas.
After the glass was removed to the bighorn sheep diorama the room became abuzz with people working, finishing setting up and moving on to each of their respective tasks. A total of five different methods of capture were used, Seth and Joey worked on taking multiple 360 degree videos for use in headsets to see the exhibit as if you were in person. Bobby used the Intel Realsense depth cameras to try to capture a 3D model, Justin took many high resolution photos and later stitched them together to create an extremely large final photo, Farid and Max with the help of Michael to get in and close to the diorama set up and used the Arctek Eva Lite 3D scanner to get a model of the sheep, and finally the many photos captured were put into photogrammetry to get a large realistic model of the site.
At the end of the day, fun was had and much was learned about what to do next time and what steps to take going forward to best capture these outstanding models.
