NSMM’s Report – Summary
After reading over their marketing report, it seems clear to me that marketing to the younger audience has more of an impact, especially since Bradford is known to have the youngest population compared to many other local cities.
It is clear that a decent portion of all visitors report seeing marketing material prior to their visit, although less than 50% of visitors that are age 15 or younger. This means that in terms of marketing materials, there seems to be a disconnect from that age bracket.
More than 50% of visitors dwelled the gift shop but only around 30% purchased an item, this is common when items in a shop are interesting or when a visitor feels the need to explore the entire museum but when they’re confronted with “expensive” items they may hold off or they just didn’t find anything of value. Families are supposed to be the most common audience for the shop, this is no surprise when the shop may sell sweets or toys which are perfect for children.
More than 50% of all visitors said that they would recommend the museum to an extent, telling us that the museum is more than an average experience and that it appeals to each of it’s different audiences. A percentage of people who actually went and suggested the museum could be found if we surveyed every visitor on whether or not they were told about the museum.
And finally.. the museum is shown to be within the slowest recovery from Covid when compared to other museums, which can be explained by the recent closure.
Proposal – Research
My exhibition proposal for the National Science & Media Museum will heavily rely on Photogrammetry and LIDAR systems in order to 3D scan a person in hopes of engaging and/or educating the user. Knowing this, we need to conduct research into Photogrammetry and LIDAR, along with their applications and possible benefits to the user.
Modern Warfare® Initial Intel: How Photogrammetry is Helping to Shape Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® into a new high watermark for graphics in gaming.
Activision, the lead developer team in charge of Call of Duty, is known to use a lot of shortcuts and methods to help beat the industry. Although they have recently been exposed for using AI generated content, they have also been known to use Photogrammetry in the process of making props and clothing for their games. Did this save them time? Did it save them money? We don’t know for sure.
Regardless, it is still used to this day and helps bring life to the games, making ingame assets feel more random, chaotic and true to life. Photogrammetry truly shines when you consider how much time 3D artists put into making said objects look imperfect (scratches, dust, fingerprints, wear and tear), these are instead easily captured. Paired with the beautiful render engine of the modern Call of Duty games is truly candy to the eyes. Ignoring the UI, a quick glimpse at the image below may fool you into thinking it was actually a real photo from a person’s POV.
We won’t dive into the depths of their rendering techniques, but I felt it was worth mentioning how much photogrammetry has truly benefitted Call of Duty, especially when they have the networks and money to put towards extensive research into how everything should behave within their games, to make the game feel as close to real-life as possible.
The only issue with photogrammetry is that it can be a pain in the backside to actually implement the results due to how the mesh is built. Compared to how 3D artists rig their own characters and objects, it can be difficult to do the same for objects captured via photogrammetry as the mesh is quite messy. The face on the left is what we call messy, it has not been remeshed, using this version of the face can produce some unwanted nasty artifacts when performing modifiers or rigs on said version. With this, it is paramount that all assets in a game are remeshed to an extent.
Photogrammetry rigs do currently exist, so implementing this as an exhibit into the museum shouldn’t be hard. The rig just needs to be concealed behind something whilst being accessible to maintenance.
Typical Photogrammetry Rig For Full Body Scans:
- Circular framework / rig to hold cameras ( Unknown Price )
- 40 – 200 Cameras ( Estimated £12,000 + )
- Studio Flash Units ( Estimated £2,000 + )
- Control System ( Unknown Price )
- High Performance Processing Unit ( Estimated £3,500 + )
- General Exhibition Budget ( Unknown Price )
All the above are based on average quality products found online.
3D printers may seem like a good idea in theory, but when really thinking about how this would work as a product in a musem, things start to appear uncertain. 3D printers are quite basic in what they do, they are essentially dispensing hot melted plastic into the arrangement of a 3D object, the complicated part is how the machine calculates where to place each bit of plastic inbetween each vertex (point / corner of a polygon) and the supports it needs to build in between each step up in the Z axis. Supports are difficult because they are an additional mesh under the desired mesh, acting as a support for the plastic.
Typical 3D printers are quite expensive and quite slow. Even using the cheapest material may not be good enough as a product for neither the user or the museum.
Here a few plastic materials, there are ALOT of materials so we won’t be going over all of them. It is worth mentioning that supports can be allocated to their own type of material, allowing the support to be removed via water disolvation, making supports much easier to remove. Materials that are purposed for 3D printers are usually called filaments, they commonly range from £10 upto £100 and sometimes even upto £1,000 depending on the amount of material or the type of material.
The time to print a model isn’t great either, even if the model is a few inches wide and/or tall, it may take anything from around 30 minutes to a few hours, especially if the model is detailed. If a model is quite detailed, the model may have to be large enough to appropriately show said detail.
As an alternative we could offer to ship the printed model, but this would only bring complexity and it still wouldn’t be good enough as there would be backlog caused by the poor printing time, additonal printers would only cost more money and space.
Overall, printering the models seems like a bad idea. Maybe we should stick to offering the 3D model file for free, maybe these files can then be 3D printed by the user.
Privacy may also be a concern due to the data the exhibit may hold, if such an exhibit was to exist, there would need to be a way to ensure trust upon all visitors regarding their information and data, they may like idea of their 3D scan floating around the museum for anyone to access.
Proposal – Presentation
My presentation was constructed in a way that allowed me to quickly add content whilst keeping the design dynamic, I used a black background to shift the focus away from the screen and towards me. I masked all of my images to make the images feel more “embedded” into the slides. I tried to minimise the amount of text as much as possible for each slide, segmenting each slide into it’s own dose of specific content. I only used high resolution images, anything low resolution wouldve spoiled the presentation as it wouldn’t have fit with the text. Overall the presentation was made to be simplistic for the sake of manipulating the viewer’s focus and keeping things digestable.
Proposal – Evaluation
Feedback:
A confident and well thought out presentation. The idea of bringing LIDAR and PPMS technology to the museum audience was very interesting, especially as these technologies are used in film, TV and gaming (so relevant to our mission). We also liked the fact that this would bring visitors closer to technology that wouldn’t otherwise be available to them. Giving them the opportunity to create a memento from their visit and literally see themselves reflected in the technology is a great idea. We also liked the added suggestion that 3D versions could be purchased in the shop (the museum is free to enter but we do try to generate revenue as well). The only downside was that the presentation was a bit text heavy – it would have been nice to see more visual mock ups to break it up a bit.
Response:
My presentation performed well in a general sense, although the feedback suggests I should include more mockups. I mentioned within my presentation that these mockups were due later in my project, so I’ll have to start executing this as soon as possible. A key positive here is that they seemed to like the idea of having purchasable 3D prints in the gfitshop. I want to further enforce this idea by providing a proof of concept, showing a 3D printed model of myself.
Bibliography
- Hodgson, D. (2019). Initial Intel: How Photogrammetry is Helping to Shape Call of Duty?: Modern Warfare? into a new high watermark for graphics in gaming. [online] blog.activision.com. Available at: https://blog.activision.com/call-of-duty/2019-06/Initial-Intel-How-Photogrammetry-is-Helping-to-Shape-Call-of-Duty-Modern-Warfare-into-a-new-high-watermark-for-graphics-in-gaming [Accessed 21 Oct. 2024].
- Team, A. (2021). 3D body scanning and the best full body scanners guide. [online] Aniwaa. Available at: https://www.aniwaa.com/guide/3d-scanners/3d-body-scanning/ [Accessed 21 Oct. 2024].