Preserving Museum Exhibits with Matterport Tours and Photogrammetry

November 2019

Last year, my colleague Albert William and I purchased a Matterport camera. In September 2018, we partnered with the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis on a project to digitally preserve two of their exhibits before one of them disappeared forever.

The Challenge: Archiving an Immersive Experience

The museum’s “Take Me There: China” exhibit was scheduled to come down after a four-year run—these country-themed exhibits rotate every few years. The exhibit was designed to create an immersive experience, transporting visitors into Chinese culture and daily life. What better way to preserve that immersion than with an immersive virtual experience?

We also scanned the Dinosphere and its Paleo Lab. The museum has an impressive collection of real dinosaur fossils and casts, along with a working paleontology lab where staff prep bones for display or storage. Getting inside that space to see everything up close was genuinely thrilling.

Creating the Matterport Tours

Over a few nights, Albert and I scanned both exhibits with the Matterport camera, capturing every angle and detail. The results are virtual tours that let anyone explore these spaces long after the physical exhibits have changed or been de-installed.

Dinosphere and Paleo Lab:

Take Me There: China:

Be sure to click the pins embedded throughout—they reveal photogrammetry models that let you examine individual objects in full-screen 3D.

Adding Photogrammetry: 100 Photos Per Object

In addition to the Matterport tours, we worked with an independent study student, Jake McCarty, to create photogrammetry of several items from each exhibit. Over two separate nights, we photographed objects that would be embedded into the virtual tours as interactive 3D models.

The process is meticulous. Each object is placed on a lazy Susan and photographed at 10-degree increments from at least three different angles—over 100 images per object. From that data, software derives a detailed 3D model. Both nights, it took just over three hours to shoot eight objects.

A Return to Studio Photography

I have to admit: this project was a great excuse to dust off photo gear I hadn’t used in far too long. Setting up strobes and softboxes, dialing in the lighting—for whatever reason, that process is deeply satisfying to me. It brought back fond memories of my days as a working photographer and left me longing for a dedicated studio again.

The “Take Me There: China” exhibit has since been de-installed, but thanks to these Matterport tours and photogrammetry models, it lives on as an immersive digital archive.

Setting up this amazing dinosaur skull for a photogrammetry scan. The skull was spun and photographed 36 times, from a low position (seen here), from a straight on angle and then from a high angle. Jake McCarty, seen on the right in this photo, then prepped the photos for the photogrammetry processing.

This cart has some of the other objects we scanned. The mastodon (or maybe it was a mammoth) jawbone on the bottom unfortunately proved too big to shoot correctly.

Some more bones in the Paleo lab.

Stills of the photogrammetry

Getting a chance to tour the back storage rooms of the museum was amazing, especially if you like taxidermy. Here are a few snaps I took in passing.