“Uncle Beazley,” after his refresh at OEC

Recently, I had the rare opportunity to visit the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Exhibits Central (OEC) in Landover, MD. A friend of mine, Richard Gould, is an Exhibits Specialist there. I was thrilled to be invited. I went with well-known DC-area artist and über-geek, Alberto Gaitán.

The large warehouse building is unmarked, in an industrial complex on the outskirts of town. After going through security and getting badges, we followed Richard toward the labs. The first thing we were greeted by, in grand museum style, was a gigantic fiberglass Triceratops. On skateboards! (Actually little wheeled carts for easy transport). It was a refurbishing job from the National Zoo. The dino, nicknamed “Uncle Beazley,” is a copy of a dinosaur that premiered at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Beazley belongs to the Smithsonian, but got loaned to the National Zoo (which is actually part of the SI) many years ago, and had gotten rather funky in a small plot near the lemur house. So he was hefted onto a lowboy and gingerly driven to Exhibits Central for some cleaning and a little R&R (restoration and relaxation) before he goes back to his home at the Zoo.

From there, we entered the 3D Digitization Lab, where we met Adam Metallo and Vince Rossi. They showed us a number of projects they’re working, such as crowdsourced environmental image synthesis (where 3D environments are auto-generated, using libraries of tagged images — e.g. a 3D environment of The National Mall using Flickr images that people have shared with the appropriate tags). One issue they’re trying to resolve is: How do you get people to photograph the less interesting stuff. You only tend to get images of things like the Capitol building, the Washington Monument, etc. not the trees, the park benches, the in-between spaces. Uncle Beazley made an appearance again, as Vince had made a 3D image of him using the Microsoft GeoSynth software.

They also showed us an archeological dig (which they couldn’t discuss details of) where they took dozens of photos from the air with a eye toward making a 3D full-scale rendering of the main terrain feature of the dig (a significant discovery) that can then be reproduced in three dimensions and placed in an exhibit. They were saying it’s very revolutionary because once they have the 3D files, they can then send them to any museum around the world that could then print out a copy of the exhibit. The import of this was driven home by the fact that the first thing Richard had shown us was a storage/prep room, on the way to the labs, filled with shipping cases. He talked about the amount of effort involved in packing up and shipping exhibits to far-flung locations.

Adam Metallo shows us how their Minolta Vivid 90 3D camera works

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