MUSEUM OF PURE FORMS

Massimo Bergamasco, Percro, Scuola S.Anna, Pisa

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.