On the second floor of the Memorial Art Gallery hangs a six-foot-tall painting of a woman in flowing pink robes with a golden staff and long brown hair. She is the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau's "Young Priestess," created in 1902, and thanks to a new collaboration between the museum and the Rochester Institute of Technology, there's more to her than can be seen with the naked eye.
When seen through the lens of a capable smartphone camera, the woman comes to life. The drapes behind her tear away to reveal spinning stars and galaxies within the frame of the painting. She puts her hand on her hip and slams her staff on the ground, breaking chunks off the mosaic floor. Then she dissolves into a swirl of light particles, eventually becoming a star herself before the scene fades to black.
The Harry Potter-esque effect was achieved not with magic, but with augmented reality, AR, technology. A photography class and a 3D digital graphics class at RIT teamed up through January and February to enhance 10 paintings at the MAG with AR technology, and the results include a flying tour through an impressionist harbor and three friends relaxing by a beach fire inside a Monet.
"It's stimulating, it's provocative, it makes you think, and the most important thing is if it brings you back to the artwork to see the artwork in a new way, then that artwork continues to live in a meaningful way in our culture," said MAG Chief Curator and Brighton resident Marjorie Searl. "There's sort of a brave new world out there that technology has invented."
COLLABORATIVE CLASS
The project began when Susan Lakin and David Halbstein, an associate professor and assistant professor in the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at RIT, combined their photography and 3D digital graphics classes into one Collaborative Composite Image course.
"One of our goals with the class was to expose each of the disciplines to what the other was doing," Lakin said. "The 3D digital graphics students don't always realize what goes into the production of a photoshoot, and the photography students don't always understand the amount of time that goes into developing and building the 3D models in the programs they're using."
The collaborative course, Lakin said, would simulate what happens in the industry today and help the students develop a common technical language.
On the second floor of the Memorial Art Gallery hangs a six-foot-tall painting of a woman in flowing pink robes with a golden staff and long brown hair. She is the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau's "Young Priestess," created in 1902, and thanks to a new collaboration between the museum and the Rochester Institute of Technology, there's more to her than can be seen with the naked eye.
When seen through the lens of a capable smartphone camera, the woman comes to life. The drapes behind her tear away to reveal spinning stars and galaxies within the frame of the painting. She puts her hand on her hip and slams her staff on the ground, breaking chunks off the mosaic floor. Then she dissolves into a swirl of light particles, eventually becoming a star herself before the scene fades to black.
The Harry Potter-esque effect was achieved not with magic, but with augmented reality, AR, technology. A photography class and a 3D digital graphics class at RIT teamed up through January and February to enhance 10 paintings at the MAG with AR technology, and the results include a flying tour through an impressionist harbor and three friends relaxing by a beach fire inside a Monet.
"It's stimulating, it's provocative, it makes you think, and the most important thing is if it brings you back to the artwork to see the artwork in a new way, then that artwork continues to live in a meaningful way in our culture," said MAG Chief Curator and Brighton resident Marjorie Searl. "There's sort of a brave new world out there that technology has invented."
COLLABORATIVE CLASS
The project began when Susan Lakin and David Halbstein, an associate professor and assistant professor in the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at RIT, combined their photography and 3D digital graphics classes into one Collaborative Composite Image course.
"One of our goals with the class was to expose each of the disciplines to what the other was doing," Lakin said. "The 3D digital graphics students don't always realize what goes into the production of a photoshoot, and the photography students don't always understand the amount of time that goes into developing and building the 3D models in the programs they're using."
The collaborative course, Lakin said, would simulate what happens in the industry today and help the students develop a common technical language.
Lakin and Halbstein were planning the course when the September issue of "GQ" hit newsstands. Every advertisement in the magazine had an AR component, and one of them featured a painting coming to life.
"I was totally excited about that," Lakin said. "On the first day of classes I ran around showing it to everybody."
"We just thought, if there's a way that we can figure this out, lets see if we can do something like this with the class," Halbstein said.
The living painting in the pages of the magazine inspired Lakin and Halbstein to approach the MAG about the course's final project, and Searl was receptive.
"It sounded like an interesting endeavor," Searl said. "We are a very low-tech institution, so whenever somebody has an idea we feel would be a good fit, we're always interested in their expertise."
The first step was for the students to team up in pairs of one photography student, one 3D digital graphics student each. They went on a trip to the MAG to choose which paintings they would augment, then brought in a Color Management for Photographers class to capture true-color digital images of the paintings for the students to work with.
The students then had one month to work together using the Aurasma smartphone app to create the AR effects before a final critique at the MAG late last month.
"In the beginning of the course we would get in front of the class and it looked like a wedding, with the bride's side and the groom's side, the photo students and the CG students," Halbstein said. "As the class went on there was more co-mingling, and in the labs when we saw them teaching each other that was really refreshing."
For the students, working together wasn't easy at first.
"It's just a very different work flow, so it was hard to adjust to that," said Bryan Gillotte, 32, a 3D Digital Graphics major who took the course. "It was also a very positive experience, for sure, because that's something I'm going to have to do in the field."
The students weren't the only ones who considered the course a lesson in collaboration.
"I know that Susan and I both learned a lot ourselves about collaborating as professors," Halbstein said. "I don't want to say that the students exceeded my expectations, because I didn't have any expectations, but they took it to a level that we hadn't even talked about."
AUGMENTED ART
Gillotte's project focused on Rachel Ruysch's 1686 "Floral Still Life." When a museum visitor looks at the painting through Aurasma, a woman walks in front of the frame, and butterflies leave the painting and fly around her head as she walks away.
The students' final critique at the MAG fell on a family day there, and children seeing the effect would look around the phones or iPads, thinking the woman who disturbed the butterflies was real.
"It was fun to see how people were enchanted and excited about it," Gillotte said. "There was a lot of 'How's it done?' That's what we want to hear."
For now, the AR aspects of the art at the MAG is something of an inside secret. A Collaborative Composite Image app is available in the Google Play store for Android devices and in the iTunes App Store for Apple devices.
There is no mention of AR near any of the 10 paintings that employ the effect at the MAG, and visitors are largely unaware of their smartphone's capability to enhance their gallery experience.
"How we will work with it, I'm not sure yet," Searl said. "For us it's very cool and very fun. What the applicability is, I don't think we've even begun to explore."
Lakin said the AR truly did augment the art.
"It gives people a different perspective," she said. "I think with kids in particular, technology has become such a part of their life that it helps to engage them with the new technology to investigate the artwork even more."
Gillotte agreed.
"Kids now are growing up with iPhones in their hands, he said. "It adds another dimension that's going to help pull young people in and make art a more interactive experience."
Searl said she looked forward to finding new ways to share the technology with museum visitors in the future.
"Having the opportunity to provide this as an exciting experience for our visitors is great," Searl said. "I think that we're just at the beginning of figuring out how else this can be used."
As for the Collaborative Composite Image course?
"It's already on the schedule for next year," Halbstein said.
