A Busy June
Last month I was lucky enough to be in contact with The Smithsonian, Brighton University, the City of London, and Smartify.
I was busy keeping my nose to the grindstone in June, speaking to and with a broad range of cultural heritage, academic, and commercial tech organisations…
If you’re looking for someone to talk to about spatial heritage, I am available for hire - just drop me an email to get the conversation started!
The Smithsonian Institution
If you work in the field of cultural heritage + 3D, you have no doubt heard of Smithsonian 3D —one of the most well developed 3D digitisation programmes in the world. I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with a few of the folks over there from time to time: launching the CC0/public domain initiative at Sketchfab, and contributing to the development of the IIIF spec for 3D. It is in part due to these collaborations that, at the beginning of June, I was invited to present online to the Smithsonian Institution’s ‘3D Interest Group’.
You can imagine that I felt some anxiety at the prospect trying to present something new to folks from an organisation which has been leading the charge in 3D for heritage for years 😅 Lucky for me, though, it is no exaggeration to say that the 3D team at the SI are as friendly as they are knowledgeable and I had a great time.
My presentation focussed on putting the good work of the SI in context with other heritage digitisation initiatives around the world, wider trends in the spatial heritage sector, and tying everything back to core use cases for 3D like storytelling, outreach, and engagement.
Guildhall 3D
As mentioned in a previous edition of SHR, I am involved with a recently announced project which aspires to capture the interior of the City of London’s Guildhall Great Hall in 3D. There’s a lot more to the project than that (which I unfortunately can’t talk about quite yet) and plans are progressing positively throughout June, so here is a tiiiiny sneak peek at what I’ve been up to on the 3D side of things…
Brighton University
Towards the end of June I was invited by the good folks at Brighton University’s Digital Skills Training Network to deliver a workshop on accessible methods of 3D digitisation. I really enjoyed working with a small group of participants from both the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation and Royal Holloway, University of London, discussing use cases for 3D and giving them hands on experience capturing photogrammetry image sets and using 3DF Zephyr, Polycam, and other software. A bonus for me, I learned how to capture and process RTI image data!
Smartify
To round off a month of activity, I was invited by the Smartify to present to their advisory board (a group of Smartify power users from the heritage sector). The content I shared with this group was an adjusted version of the “Overview of the Spatial Heritage” that I had presented to the Smithsonian Group earlier in the month. It was also very interesting to get a glimpse of the good work being done over at Smartify regarding rich media mobile tours and guides.
Maintaining Momentum
All in all, June was a great confirmation that the field of 3D and spatial heritage is alive, developing, and growing. Not only is this a positive confirmation of my own beliefs, it also keeps me optimistic about carving out my own professional niche in this space 😊