Bringing the museum to Mohammed

The saying used to be: ‘if Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed’, but the Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery is taking the same approach by utilising multimedia to bring the collections of the oldest public museum in Scotland to life online.

Mr Jim Devine is Head of Multimedia at the museum, which is based within the University of Glasgow. “Coming to view a real painting by Whistler, or a Mackintosh chair, or seeing a Roman inscribed stone from the Antonine wall is by far the best way of engaging with our collections, but of course, it’s not possible for everyone to do that,’ he says. “So, we developed the first website of any museum in Scotland 12 years ago, working with colleagues in the Department of Computing Science. You wouldn’t be surprised to discover that there have been relationships between the museum and the Departments of Archaeology, Art History, Classics and Geology for many years. However, at the time it was very much a new thing for a department of computing science to be interested in a building full of old stuff. This was bringing together the old and the new - combining our expertise in presenting information about objects with the skills of our computing science colleagues to explore different ways in which we could project that information beyond the confines of the building that we have.”

“We’ve tried, ever increasingly, to make the material that is available online as interactive as possible. We want it to replicate, as close as we can manage, the experience of coming to visit the museum - because nothing will ever replace that.” Mr Jim Devine

Mr Devine and his team have been pioneers in using software techniques to create virtual tours of, for example, the Mackintosh House, which is a recreation of the home of the famous architects and artists Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. “This is nothing to do with putting on a helmet and gloves and feeling your way around,” Mr Devine explains. “It’s actually using photorealism – taking photographs of a space through 360 degrees and using the software to merge those images to create the illusion of movement on screen.”

The next step for the museum is to move beyond even the web, to utilise the possibilities for using technology to deliver information content and podcasts to mobile phones. “As an organisation, especially a museum that is part of a university, we feel we have a responsibility to take the learning that’s happening within the University and spread it out beyond the walls,” says Mr Devine.

To take a virtual tour of the Mackintosh house here.