SFMOMA Interpretive Gallery

Interactive museum installations at SFMOMA

We decided to use the window as a motif from Magritte's painting to frame our experiences. We ideated experience designs from objects and philosophy in Magritte's paintings. With multiple iterations and prototyping closely working with client during short period of time, we designed and implemented 6 experiences which represented the core philosophy behind Magritte's pieces (please check out the video above for what experiences are like). The whole process was about 2.5 months in total from concepting to the exhibition opening.

We used NVIDIA Jetson TX2 as our machine since its small form factor, and SDK requirement for the stereo camera module (ZED Mini) were great fit for our needs. The software was developed in openFrameworks, which we custom-built the whole package to suite Jetson’s computer architecture (arm64). For the application input, we used ZED Mini Camera, which is a small form factor 2 RGB cameras with deep learning algorithm behind to generate depth map. We developed a custom algorithm to cutout a silhouette standing in front of the window with smoother outline to represent Magritte’s motif. Almost every image processing and rendering is happening at GPU level with OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) to keep the application performant enough even with a limited CPU on Jetson TX2. We also implemented system level events, which include scheduled shutdown and reboot, fatal error monitoring (e.g., application crash, camera stopped working, etc.) and system report integration with Slack, usage data tracking for analyzing marketing values later.

The interpretive gallery was positively recognized amongst visitors, according to the survey SFMOMA conducted, with great number of attentions and posts on social network platform (e.g., Instagram, Twitter, etc.), and awarded the GOLD Muse award in AR/VR. The work has been also featured in major publications, such as SF Chronicle and [Mashable] (https://mashable.com/article/augmented-reality-art-museums-rene-magritte-sfmoma/).