OVERVIEW
The Queen of the Night, also known as Burney Relief, is a terracotta relief from Southern Mesopotamia depicting the goddess Ishtar or Inanna on display at the British Museum.
In collaboration with Dr Eleonora Bacchi, who leads the DymonLab project, we found that a documented colour reconstruction carried out by the researcher Dominique Collon was already published in printed form in 2005.
We used this material to showcase the potential in communicating scientific results to the public through the employment of AR by turning a mobile device into a lens through which the artefact is seen as if fully painted.
To bring to life the colour reconstruction in front of the visitors’ eyes, we’ve employed a photogrammetry 3D scan as well as Vuforia’s Object Detection SDK to develop a demo mobile app that overlays the polychrome reconstruction on top of the original artefact.
Scope of work and skills
Photogrammetry 3D scan with Agisoft Metashape, 3D painting in Blender (based on a reconstruction published by the museum), implementation of Vuforia's Object Detection SDK in a Unity app for Android and iOS, and music creation in GarageBand (basic skills, mostly samples to be fair).
COLLABORATORS
Dr Eleonora Bacchi (founder of the DymonLab project) and Alessandro Binetti (video recording and editing)