ICON: Authentic 3D Cultural Heritage Models for the Creative Industries

Many UK museums are developing their expertise in the creation of 3D models of objects in their collection. Traditionally museums, galleries and libraries have used 2D images to aid them in their collections management, conservation and research and public access to their collections. The opportunity of 3D imaging can make all of these areas of museum activity a much richer experience. UK museums have always been active in their support for the UK creative industries, notably through their picture libraries. Images from UK collections can be seen on a daily basis in fine art publications, general media as well as on film and television. With the development of computer graphics in film and TV, computer games, and ubiquitous multimedia on the web, there is now an opportunity to market 3D models of cultural objects. High-quality digitised 3D models and textures are required for use in film and television post production, games development, architectural visualisation and, most recently, furnishing virtual business premises within VR worlds like Second Life. These models and textures are usually created from scratch by digital artists as required, but this is a costly and time-consuming process. The task of just researching the source designs takes a significant amount of effort before modelling can even begin. In the ICON project, Evolutions Television, Smoke & Mirrors, System Simulation, the V&A and the University of Southampton’s IT Innovation Centre are collaborating to develop a content exchange mechanism, through which 3D digitised design artefacts from museums will be made available for reuse by the digital media industries. ICON will allow for pre-digitised furniture, decorative objects, fashion, fabric designs and wallpaper patterns to be made available for the dressing of virtual sets and clothing avatars. Users of ICON content will benefit from easy access to pre-built high-quality authentic period and contemporary digital models. In return, we will enable a new revenue stream for museums that will allow them to resource further 3D digitisation work. In this paper we will present the tools and techniques developed to achieve the vision of ICON. We begin with an overview of the ICON project and the overall system architecture, before describing in more detail some of the steps necessary to take 3D models originated for museum curatorial purposes and make them suitable for reuse by the digital creative industries