Imaging Research Center - Cone Sister’s Apartments


In what is likely a first for museums around the country, The Baltimore Museum of Arts and UMBC's Imaging Research Center have collaborated to develop a virtual tour of the Cone Sister's apartments. This state-of-the-art virtual tour uses real-time computer animation to allow visitors to guide themselves through the rooms where the Baltimore sisters lived from the 1870s until the 1940s and where their renowned collection of post-Impressionist and modern art was originally displayed.

Imaging Research Center - UMBC

The Imaging Research Center (IRC) is a digitally based research and production facility at UMBC that operates in conjunction with the Department of Visual Arts. The IRC provides a forum for faculty, researchers, corporate partners, and students to research new digital technologies and their innovative use in interpreting and presenting content. The IRC has diverse, high-end visualization facilities and conducts research that focuses on animation, real-time visualization, interactivity, and immersive technologies. Since its inception in 1987, it has gained a national reputation for producing high-profile, state-of-the-art computer visualizations for broadcast, distribution, and installation.

The Cone Sisters

Etta and Claribel Cone were two sisters, who over a period of 30 years, amassed one of the world most acclaimed collections of early 20th century French art. This «Cone Collection» with its incomparable holdings of work by Henri Matisse and major examples of Picasso, Cezanne, van Gogh, and Renoir, was donated to The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) along with most of the sisters' possessions and furniture in 1950. During their lives, however, the Cone sisters lived with, and displayed their collection in their apartments. They were passionate about collecting, and their apartments were full of items.

The Application

This project meticulously reconstructs the early 20th century apartments as they were and gives a glimpse of how the sisters incorporated their collection into their everyday life. This virtual rendition of these original apartments allows viewers to «walk-through» the collection as the Cone sisters did daily. The Virtual Tour of the Cone Sisters Apartments is presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art as a real time interactive simulation.

Viewers navigate through the corridors and rooms of the Cone Sisters' apartments, immersed in the environment in which the sisters exhibited their extensive collection of then contemporary masterworks. Two versions were developed simultaneously. Evaluation and beta testing of the first version of the project was done on-site at The Baltimore Museum of Art using museum visitors. The piece has worked successfully at the Museum for over a year and has proven to be a highlight of a visitor's experience.

First, a touch plasma screen version was developed for permanent display in the Cone Wing of the Museum. Viewers explore and move about the apartments by intuitively touching objects, doors, and artworks. An interactive floor plan of the building is available as a means to quickly move to a specific room. A second version was developed to give viewers an immersive experience and was installed at the Museum for two weeks in April of 2001. Driven by multiple CPUs networked together, the apartments are presented on a large rear-screen multiple projection screen in polarized passive stereoscopic vision. Gallery visitors navigated through the apartments by using a joy stick fashioned after a door knob from the original apartments.

The challenge

Reconstructing the Cone sisters' apartments was difficult, because there are few remaining records of the original building whereas the main challenge was to depict the apartments photo-realistically.

After locating floor plans of the original apartments, the Imaging Research Center (IRC) started the complex process of creating a computer-generated, real-time, 3-D reconstruction of the apartments, building wall by wall and room by room. Using measurements taken of the existing building, the IRC was able to accurately place 34 of the 37 existing photographs from the 1930s and 40s that document the Cone sisters' apartments. Each of 600+ objects and artwork has been painstakingly modelled and textured to appear three dimensional in the virtual home of the Cone sisters.

Spatialized audio is also used to represent the apartments. In one room where the sisters hung a group of Matisse drawings in tribute to their friendship with Gertrude Stein, an excerpt of Stein's «cubist» essay of the two sisters, entitled «Two Women» is heard.

Solution

All datas were exported to the powerful real-time interactive animation authoring program, Virtools Dev, which provided a robust rendering engine that could handle the size and scope of the project. Digital images taken of the actual paintings, sculpture, and furniture in The Cone Collection were added, as well as music in rooms where a piano or radio was located.

Key Benefits

Virtools allowed creating an immersive experience that reaches new levels of digital design in less than 6 months, recreating hundreds of details for each room, piece of furniture, and household object featured in more than 30 archival photographs. Virtools also provided the means for interface design, interaction with objects, camera movement, navigation, and support of sound and text.