Following my previous projects on the college model and digitising Compass Arts, ESCG once again brought me and Dexter back to mentor a group of students. This time they were second year games development students and we would be making a social story and 360 tour of the charleston art gallery in lewes.
This time it was a priority for whatever we made to be easily accessible from the web which places some rather significant constraints on what we can make. So, heres what we did.
The Plan
I decided that the best course of action to digitise the gallery would be by making a 360 tour tour similar to that used by real estate companies or google maps street view. This should allow for easy viewing online from a variety of platforms and be able to be made fairly quickly. A big focus this time was getting the students involved more and teaching them the processes we were using.
Its also worth noting we only had 2 days at the gallery to do this so as ever, time was of the essence. Furthermore we had very little information on what we would even be doing or if a 360 camera would be accessible so I was having to plan while I was at Charleston speaking to the students. I am someone who does well under pressure but admittedly this was sort of at the limit of what I can make possible. But hey, we managed it fine and the plan went perfectly with all the students having things to do!
The process
The first thing we did was meet up at Charleston with all the students, here we were introduced to them and we introduced the concept of the project. The general plan which id made was for the students to spread through the gallery taking reference photos of the art pieces and rooms. These could then be used as a backup in the event the main plan went wrong along with being useful either way for the web page I planned to make.
Next Dexter and I setup an Insta360 3D camera which we had been given access to by the Lewes campus of ESCG. We then took the students around as groups letting them position the camera to take 360 degree captures all around the gallery. The plan is to embed these on the website into the 360 tour.
Once this was all done the students went home after uploading their photos and I begun experimenting with an open source tool called Panellum for making the 3D viewer. After some experimentation Dexter and I decided this was the best thing for us to use and proceeded to spend the next 6 hours straight, well into the night, fully making the 3D tour.
The next day we presented what we had assembled to the students and tasked them with collaborating to make a web page layout and text sections for our deliverable.
Whilst they wrote these I made a functional web page with their material which I had designed to be similar to the current design of the Charleston website.
Finally everything was implemented fully and tested accross a variety of platforms for scalability and then presented to the team at Charleston. They were extremely happy with the final result and we are too! Ive embedded what we delivered on my site so you can look through it and I think its pretty good for two days of work!
The deliverable
https://katie.games/custom-html/charleston
