: General

Graham Davies, Online Curator, Amgeddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales

Earlier this year I was approached by the Keeper of Art regarding a recent acquisition of two oil paintings dating from 1700. The paintings in question - two large panoramic paintings of Margam House - were purchased with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund, and as the funding included some form of digital exploration, I was asked to produce an interactive to compliment the gallery display (that would also be available to tour with the paintings).

On closer inspection of the paintings, lot of small, intricate detail became noticeable.  As some details were very small - and would benefit from additional interpretation - some sort of zoomable image would offer the visitors with the best form of digital exploration.

In previous gallery interactive developments, the New Media Department have used the iPad2 platform, but as the newer iPad3 has a retina display - a screen resolution and pixel density so high that a person is unable to discern the individual pixels at a normal viewing distance - this platform seemed ideal to explore small detail in high resolution images. As for the software, we decided to use an adaptation of a previously developed interactive that allowed the user to move around a high-resolution image to predetermined hotspots (to explain certain details of the painting).

I then went about locating numerous details on the canvas that would be interesting and informative to the viewer. I was keen to pick things out that would not be contained on the gallery labels, thus ensuring no duplication and offering an enhanced visitor experience.

Resolution issues

After obtaining high-resolution images of the two paintings I was able to upload these to our Content Management System (amgeuddfacms), to allow them to be served from our website server. It was at this point that a strange technical inconsistency occurred....

Viewing a 3800 pixel wide image on a standard Firefox browser on my desktop screen rendered the image sharp and clear. However, serving the exact same image into the iPad3 web browser rendered a fuzzy pixelated image. Given that the same image was being served to both screens it seemed that the different web browsers were handling the image in a different way.

A little bit of research on the internet revealed the possible problem: The default web browser on an iPad (Safari), runs WebKit which only seems to serve images up to a maximum size (somewhere around 1024 pixels wide). The iPad browser seemed to be downsampling the original 3800 wide image to 1024 wide, before then upscaling this 1024 wide image back up to 3800, causing the image to render at almost 400% it's downsampled 1024 pixel size.

The problem was how to get around this. After some researching on the internet for similar problems, it seemed that there was no conclusive solution. This was mainly due to the logical assumption that it’s bad practice to serve huge images to a website (especially on a mobile device such as an iPad, where web content was readily downloaded via mobile networks), so the advice was always to use small images. Of course we wanted very large images, so this didn’t help!

One solution that Chris Owen, our Web Manager came up with was to serve two halves of the image separately and automatically stitch them back together again after they loaded on the web page  - thus the page would load two smaller images. Technically this gave a good result, but cutting the image in half was not enough. We therefore generated a script that sliced the image into 500 by 500 pixels (totaling 64 separate images), and stitched them all back together again once they were loaded into the browser.

The outcome was a high-resolution image (made up of smaller individual images) that renders sharply even when zoomed right in. This gets around the issue of the Safari web browser on an iPad automatically scaling down large images.

Research suggests that this may be a first in application development of this sort, especially one developed wholly in HTML5.

Gesture enhanced interactive

Once this high resolution was served up onto the new iPad3, in high resolution quality, it became clear that it would make more sense to make this a ‘gesture enhanced’ (pinch to zoom) interactive in addition to interpreting predetermined parts of the painting.

This means that the user can now fully explore the entire image, zooming right into any part of the image, whilst being able to read interpretive labels embedded within the image.

Colour Accuracy

The next problem to solve was the one of colour accuracy. Due to the original paintings being very dark, most images that we had to play with were lightened in order to see the detail. This lightening caused the colours to be untrue to the original, something that would be noticeable once screen and canvas were next to each other in the gallery.

A quick phone call to our photography department affirmed that they had high-resolution master TIFF files available that were ‘colour correct’, i.e. the colours in the digital capture were exactly as they were in the painting.

These colour correct images turned out to be strikingly different to the ones that we had previously been playing with, the increased sharpness causing even more detail to become apparent, even figures appeared that weren’t noticeable on the previous images.

The application will be installed alongside the paintings of Margam House in the Art in Wales 1500-1700 gallery at National Museum Cardiff in October 2012.

Bringing it all together: Art in Wales 1550-1700 

A parallel development to this in-gallery interactive is a website interactive exploring a major portrait of the builder of Margam House –

(hung alongside the Margam paintings in Art in Wales 1550-1700 gallery). Again, certain parts of the painting can be explored in high resolution through interpretive labels embedded in the image. This further compliments an existing interactive, exploring another major portrait in the gallery –

It is hoped to extend this program to include all the items in the gallery, thus forming a holistic digital interpretation of Art in Wales from 1550-1700, available both within the gallery and through the website.

Over the past two weeks we have been running family activities linked to the Veolia Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012 Exhibition here at National Museum Cardiff.

Over 400 of you took part and it has been a fantastic fortnight of photographic fun! I've been busy uploading as many photos as possible to the NMC Photo Club Flickr page and I have to say they look great! When you visit the Flickr page the photos are organised into sets on the right hand side of the page so if you took part all you need to do is click on the date of your visit to the Museum and look for your name!

The photos will be going up on the screen in the Clore Discovery Centre in the Museum on Saturday the 8th of September so if you came to the workshops pop in to see your pictures on display at the National Museum!

I'd like to say a big thank you to Cat, Lauren and Catherine for all their excellent work in running the workshops and I'd like to thank everyone who came along to take part as well. Thanks!

Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales is looking for new schools to be involved in this exciting project and receive free spring bulbs.

Spring Bulbs for Schools (KS2)

Plant bulbs in your school grounds to study climate change. Join this UK wide investigation and improve science and numeracy skills. For more details visit www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/scan/bulbs

The application only takes a minute to complete and the project  is FREE to all schools who apply by the 30th July.

Within the groundwater in the rocks below our feet is a hidden world where living animals can be found. It’s a secret world that is difficult to study, and frequently forgotten as it is out of sight. In the UK these groundwater dwelling animals tend to be made up of crustaceans (which includes familiar animals such as crabs and lobsters), and range from tiny microscopic copepods to ‘larger’ shrimp like animals.

Recent survey work by Lee Knight, a freshwater ecologist, and Gareth Farr, a groundwater specialist with the Environment Agency, has found some new species to the Welsh fauna. This has included the first records for the very small amphipod Microniphargus leruthi which has now been found in a number of sites around South Wales.

Recently I joined Gareth on some fieldwork around the Bridgend area to collect some voucher specimens for the museum collections. On this particular trip we found two species not represented in the collections (and shown in the pictures). Both of these are termed ‘stygobiont’ animals, which means they are permanent inhabitants of underground environments. As a result they are characteristically white and eyeless as an adaptation to life underground.

So why does it matter that we learn about such animals and their environment? Understanding biodiversity is always important. Our whole way of life is underpinned by the environment through the food we eat, the water we drink, to the resources we use. In the case of these groundwater animals if the groundwater they live in gets polluted, then this affects not only these animals but us through contaminated water supplies. Thus even these small blind beasties have an important role to play in the sustainability of our environment.

This week is Wales Sustainability Week – a perfect time to launch St Fagans: National History Museum Travel Plan!

We are the first national museum in Wales to launch a Travel Plan, which is all about promoting sustainable travel for both visitors and staff.  This Travel Plan will ensure options for travelling by public transport, bicycle and walking are expanded and promoted. 

The public transport links to the Museum have greatly improved in recent years.  The local service bus from the city centre stops on-site directly outside the main visitor entrance.  Go to our Planning Your Visit section http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/stfagans/visit/ where you can use the Traveline Cymru journey planner tool to find out how you can visit us by public transport.

Our new shuttle bus service travels everyday between the main entrance of National Museum Cardiff and St Fagans.  It costs £3 return or £1.50 single.  Why not make a day of it and visit the two museums?  The shuttle bus timetable is on our website.

If you are feeling more energetic, the main cycle route to the Museum from Cardiff city centre is via the Ely Trail. The signposted section from Fairwater is traffic-free and follows a pleasant riverside route.  Sheltered, secure cycle parking is available for visitors outside the main entrance.  Lockers are available on request.