The Government of India plans to complete 3D digitisation of all museums under its administrative control by the year end for better conservation of artefacts.
Key points
- The entire process was being carried out by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). The 3D digitisation would be done using the JATAN virtual museum builder software which has been designed and developed by Human Centres Design and Computing Group, Centre for Development of Advance Computing, Pune.
- JATAN is a digital collection management system for Indian museums. It is a client server application with features such as image cropping, watermarking, unique numbering, management of digital objects with multimedia representations.
- It can create 3D virtual galleries and provide public access through web, mobile or touch screen kiosks.
- The Culture Ministry has under its ambit 10 museums, including those mentioned above.
- Apart from these, the Archaeological Survey of India also has site museums at 44 locations spread throughout the country in proximity to important archaeological sites.
- Besides aiding conservation, 3D digitisation in the museum space can offer visitors new ways to access and explore the collection.
- The digitisation process involves 3D scanning which means analysing a real-world object or environment to collect three-dimensional data of its shape and possibly its appearance. The collected data is then used to construct digital 3D models.
