Interactive Visualization of Painting Data with Augmented Reality

Exploration of Augmented Reality technologies has increased substantially and the increase in both popularity and technological maturity has also led to several applications being developed for educational and museum environments. Specifically, a greater focus has been placed upon creating memorable experiences that both attract and educate museum patrons. Attempts to do this involve creating both Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality experiences, such as having users enter into immersive worlds that demonstrate the history of a certain time period, or applications that overlay life-like models of those animals in the very room the user is standing in. Many of these experiences are quite exceptional but begin to lack in variety when moving towards the art gallery, and mainly focus on making painting information more accessible. In an attempt to address this, this project outlines the design and evaluation of a proof-of-concept meant to study if adding interaction through Augmented Reality to paintings themselves would be both technologically feasible and desirable.