The BCC ICCREA group issued a press release about the newly available Sala Venezia Giulia: an additional room for temporary exhibitions in the Arte in Banca virtual gallery.
The room currently hosts 5 works by Graziano Cuberli. An inauguration reception was held in Romans d’Isonzo.
For the occasion we overhauled the rest of the Arte in Banca experience. A new control scheme is now available on mobile devices, and the photogrammetries in rooms 1 and 5 can also be accessed in Augmented Reality.
New mobile control scheme
The original control scheme for the Arte in Banca project aimed at providing one-handed six-degrees-of-freedom movement on a touch device. We used a redundant control scheme for rotation, using both the gyroscope and a one finger drag gesture. This allowed for 3dof rotation, but users found the gyroscope cumbersome to use for long periods, as it imposed ergonomic constraints.
Translation was handled with a one finger press to move forward, and a two fingers tap to move backwards. This movement was combined with the drag rotation to achieve a sort of steering, which was somewhat unwieldy in tight spaces, and didn’t allow for strafing.
We added two joysticks using nipple.js, the left one controls translation, the right one controls rotation. This works well for people used to videogames, others don’t fare as well.
This sent us down a rabbit hole of academic papers, user testing, and just plain old trying other products. We found that despite the popularity of 6dof games on mobile devices, most users are just terrible at achieving any sort of mobility. This is very discouraging given our goals, but we also found out that we score great in the mobile version of Call of Duty.
It seems that there is a reason why our competitors usually restrict movement along one or more axis. This is where we stopped for the Arte in Banca project, but check this blog soon for further experimentation.
AR view
We also wanted to add better visualization tools for the objects and sculptures that we digitized. We went the easy way, by using https://modelviewer.dev/
It provides a nice 3D viewer, and it allows for webAR on both Android and iOS, complete with light estimation, and some rudimentary occlusion. It can be accessed by tapping or clicking on any 3D object in the virtual museum, then on the tiny cubic icon on the right, if you’re using a supported device.
Stay tuned, we have a lot of interesting projects to write about in the next few months!
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