IU, Museum Partnership Bears First Fruit

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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA partnership announced two years ago between Indiana University and the Uffizi Gallery in Italy is starting to show some results. The partners have unveiled a website that allows users to view more than 300 ancient artifacts and sculptures from the museum’s collection in 3D.
A team from IU led by Bernard Frischer, director of the IU Virtual World Heritage Laboratory, has been working to digitize and create 3D models of the pieces from the museum’s collection of Greek and Roman sculpture. Frischer says the team is about halfway through the five-year project and is on target to complete the effort by 2020 as planned.
The IU team includes informatics and art history students who are learning about the techniques of 3D data capture, digital modeling, and interactive online publication.
We have already digitized more works of classical sculpture than has ever been done in a single museum," said Frischer. "Even more impressive than the quantity of my students’ work is its quality. I have shown the models they have made to many museum professionals in the United States and abroad. They have been uniformly impressed, and this has led to invitations to undertake new projects of digitization at the Getty Villa in Malibu, Palazzo Altemps in Rome and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples."
You can view the Uffizi Digitization Project website by clicking here.