Gallerie dell'Accademia
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Gallerie dell’Accademia
OUR SERVICES
- Content Production
- Serious game / Gamification
- Multimedia set-up
- Digital Strategy
- Exhibition Design
Galleries as you’ve never seen them
The Gallerie dell’Accademia, one of Italy’s largest museum institutions housing the paintings of some of Europe’s greatest artists – Giorgione, Tintoretto and Titian, to name but a few – and including Andrea Palladio’s monastery, wanted to renew itself by adopting state-of-the-art technological solutions.
ETT has redesigned the experience offered by the Galleries, using state-of-the-art multimedia supports, to engage users and guarantee them an extremely exciting visit. Thanks to the use of augmented reality and touch technology, the tour of the Gallerie dell’Accademia becomes interactive, thus guaranteeing the visitor an immersive experience that allows them to discover the universe of the artists on display while having fun.
At the entrance, six touch monitors welcome visitors and allow them to access information about the five new rooms. A message from director James Ivory starts by touching the monitor, welcomes visitors and introduces them to the exhibition. Visitors can see the works on display in the new five rooms and obtain in-depth information about them. In addition, it is possible to see the thematic routes defined within the museum and view the previous locations of the works in the city of Venice. Favourite routes can also be downloaded onto visitors’ mobile devices. Visitors can also express their preference on each work by sharing it on social networks (for privacy reasons only from personal devices). The three exhibition halls of the Grand Galleries are each equipped with two touch monitors to help visitors understand the theme of the hall and the individual works in it.
The first is a static device, which describes what is in the room, while the second is an interactive device that allows the visitor to get more information about the works on display, to view the individual painting with its technical data sheet and to access further insights. The image of the work can also be resized to view it in detail.
Inside Room 4 there is also a video wall consisting of 9 modules on which a virtual tour describing the evolution of the structure of the Accademia and the Insula over the centuries can be viewed.
To accompany the visitor through the rooms, a mobile App is available, installed on rentable tablets or directly by the user on their own devices, which are used as video guides. The App, designed for different types of users (Children, Teens, Adults) allows visitors to explore certain aspects and details of the works that are not naturally perceptible. All this makes a visit to the Accademia Galleries interesting even for children and young people, who can learn about the history of the structure and the works it contains while having fun.
The mobile application designed for children (5-10 years) and teenagers (10-16 years) has a series of games that accompany the visitor on a tour through all five rooms (such as treasure hunts, memory and puzzles).
The mobile app of the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia is a veritable video guide where the user can consult thematic itineraries defined within the museum and view the previous locations of the works in the city of Venice. It integrates BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) technology with Augmented Reality solutions, automatically showing the gallery of works in the room where the visitor is located.
It is divided into two macro-sections, Paths and Works: the first, in turn, is composed of five sections – Artistic Genres, Provenance, Centuries, Artists and Main Works – while the second is composed of sections indicating the three rooms, where the works can be found. After selecting a path in the touch application, visitors can instantly reach the same path using the QR Code, simply by pointing their camera at the QR code on the touch screen.
Memory – The classic memory game in which children have to find pairs of pictures of the same work in a 3×4 grid. With each new game, the cards are placed randomly.
Puzzle – A puzzle game in which young users will have to reconstruct an image, chosen from 4 available works, by simply moving the pieces randomly arranged on the screen. Different levels of difficulty are available.
Treasure Hunt – In this game, a clue is offered for each room and the visitor must choose the corresponding work from the three proposed on the device’s screen. For each new game, the position of the works changes randomly.
Find the differences – For each room, visitors are presented with two images of seemingly identical works, and will have to discover five hidden differences.
The mobile app on tablets for adults, on the other hand, has extra features that allow access to greater levels of detail. There are, for example, thematic routes, among which are highlighted those that may have been chosen in the reception monitors, augmented reality, through which it is possible to see what emerged during the restoration of the work or to view the work in three-dimensional mode, in-depth videos and more complex games.
In the Treasure Hunt game, for example, only the clue to the work in the selected room will be offered: to complete the search, the visitor will receive immediate feedback by framing the picture with the camera. In Find the Differences, on the other hand, the device will only show the picture of the non-original work, thus asking the visitor to compare it with the real painting to discover the differences. To stimulate the educational aspects of the memory game, at the end, the visitor will be asked to find associations between the work and its author.
The development of the Augmented Reality functionality, on the other hand, was based on the use of image recognition techniques that allow the visitor to recognise the works using the camera of the mobile device. All 48 works have been precisely tracked so that the application can draw information from a local dictionary, without the need for an Internet connection during use. The 3D reconstructions displayed in some of the cards have been inserted using Unity3D scenes, appropriately integrated into the application’s native code. Visitors are also able to view the state of conservation of some works before restoration, thanks to the use of image recognition features. By focusing on the work with the device’s camera, they can ‘scratch’ with their fingers on the screen to erase the effect of the restoration and view the work in its original state.