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The Tech + IFTF: Body Worlds Decoded
Building on a long-term relationship, Institute for the Future partnered with The Tech Museum of Innovation to create a first-generation interactive, custom augmented reality (AR) experience for the world-renowned Body Worlds exhibition opening October 15, 2017. The collaboration with IFTF’s Emerging Media Lab began in 2016 with a project to conduct futures research and scope the possibilities for the design and development of an entirely new AR experience for museum visitors to experience this exhibit.
The results led IFTF’s work in the development of an entirely new AR content authoring and management software solution, called "ARtifactor™," which enabled The Tech to customize content for the exhibit’s new Iris AR system. The Iris system uses IFTF's ARtifactor™ software running on Google Tango-enabled mobile devices that feature depth sensing cameras.
The experience allows visitors in Body Worlds Decoded to view and interact with 3D models and virtual objects in the 5,000-square-foot exhibition, including a heart, eyeball, digestive tract, and skull. Over time, The Tech will use ARtifactor to add 3D models, animations, and other content to the exhibition, so visitors will always have something new to discover.
“This is the future of museums—AR is about to transform how we interpret our world and how we approach education. The Tech has emerged as a leader in the exciting AR movement, offering a whole new world of immersive technology that will influence museums and exhibitions globally.”
—Toshi Anders Hoo, Lead AR Consultant & Director of IFTF’s Emerging Media Lab
The Emerging Media Lab at IFTF
The Emerging Media Lab (EML) at Institute for the Future explores the rapidly evolving technologies and platforms that are transforming human communication. Over the past 100 years, we have seen exponential growth in the tools which humans use to share information, knowledge, emotions, and experiences—with one another, with the rest of the world, and into the future for others to learn from and build upon. Communication technologies have and will continue to be the most powerfully accelerating factor in the development of human culture and conscious.
The EML at IFTF serves as a prototyping studio, an independent research group, and an active participant in the continually evolving relationship between humans and the sophisticated media systems we create.
About ARtifactor™
ARtifactor is a custom software solution, developed by the Institute for the Future (IFTF), that can be used in museums, retail stores and other indoor facilities for persistent visualizations of content in three-dimensional space. In the museum, ARtifactor™ is a platform that expands the curatorial narrative, constructing real space hot spots to hold augmented reality interpretive layers, with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology.
The first exhibition to use the ARtifactor™ platform, and expand its content into a layer of augmented reality, is Body Worlds Decoded, 2017 at The Tech Museum in San Jose, CA.
More Information
Learn more about using ARtifactor™ to curate content and build a narrative in your space:
- Contact Toshi Anders Hoo at [email protected]
- Visit the Emerging Media Lab at IFTF
- Download ARtifactor at The Tech Info Sheet (PDF)
ARtifactor™ is a platform by the Emerging Media Lab at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit think tank with 50 years of experience researching the future and helping organizations make sense of it.