The Museum of Pure Form

Project Description

	PURE-FORM is the acronym of a RTD project funded by the European Community, currently running under the IST programme with contract No IST-2000-29580. The project is aimed at the realization of the Museum of Pure Form, a virtual reality system where the user can interact, through the senses of touch and sight, with digital models of 3D art forms and sculptures. The objective of the PURE-FORM project is to offer museums visitors, students, researchers, blind and visually impaired users new ways of interaction with 3D works of art through the innovative concept of haptic perception (from the Greek “haptesthai” meaning “to touch”), thus overcoming the traditional limit of the art fruition based on the mere observation by sight. The sense of touch is extremely important for anyone who is interested in fully grasping the essence of any 3 dimentional (3D) form of art. While it wouldn’t be reasonable to let anyone touch statues exposed in a gallery, for obvious safety reasons, it can be argued that sight only cannot be enough for someone to fully appreciate every aspect of 3D art piece that stands in front of them. Surely the perception that an artist shaping an object has of it is very different from the one of a person simply starting at it from a certain distance.

The virtual reality system of the “Museum of Pure Forms” (MPF system) will explore different paradigms for the fruition of digital models of sculptures. Force feedback cues will be provided to the user through two different haptic interface (HI) systems, based on two different paradigms of haptic interaction.

The overall system will be highly user-friendly and will be accessible to any standard visitor of a museum. The evaluation of the MPF system will not be performed inside real museums only. A gallery-like environment, containing a set of digital representations of selected sculptures, will be recreated virtually. The overall Virtual Environment (VE) will be visually reproduced inside a CAVE system, a multi-person, room-sized, high-resolution, 3D video and audio environment.
Users will be able to navigate through such environment, select a specific sculpture to be examined and interact with it.

The added value offered by the Museum of Pure Form to the traditional museum
The MPF was conceived with the aim not only to offer innovative technological instruments for the preservation of Cultural Heritage, but also to offer visitors and researchers new paradigms of interaction and study of works of art. With regard to researchers, the MPF allows them to study a digital haptic model, as a perfect copy of the real art piece, in all its peculiar aspects, including eventual inscriptions, without moving and touching the art piece, or removing it from protective showcases. As far as museums visitors are concerned, they are offered a new paradigm of art fruition that goes beyond the mere observation by sight, thus allowing a deeper understanding of art and increasing the interest of museums visitors towards works of art. Another highly important aspect to be underlined is the function the MPF can have for blind and visually impaired users allowing them to perceive art forms and offering them a deeper fruition of art collections.

Besides combining the visual component with the haptic perception, the MPF system allows a deeper fruition of the art works, since the selected digitized works of art can be enriched with further textual and graphics information about the author, the original placing, the history and so on. Moreover, in case of damaged works of art, it will be possible to extract additional information by comparing two digital models representing each the original condition, and the current state of the art pieces.

One functional aspect of the MPF worth mentioning concerns the possibility of interacting with works of art having variable dimensions or difficult access, by using scalable digital, models which will allow anyone to touch some up-scaled detail of an art piece, in order to better analyse specific parts of it, as well as a down-scaled version of a big object, in order to perceive its overall form, structure, style.

While advanced information technologies are being more and more employed in the Cultural Heritage for preservation and restoration, with the introduction of the MPF technology users and visitors are offered the possibility of experimenting an innovative and definitely more exciting relationship with works of art.

In the future, with the diffusion of the MPF technology museums, which are already bringing down architectural barriers in order to facilitate the access of disabled persons, will offer blind people a deeper fruition of their art collections.

Some medioeval and contemporary sculptures from some relevant European museums have already been digitally acquired. The choice of two historical-artistic periods which are so different and distant is not accidental, but aims at showing that the MPF can be used for a deeper fruition of works of art belonging to different periods.