ARTechs to Help Museums and Cultural Institutions Come Alive
From pathology to the Scripture, ARTechs uses augmented reality to create immersive experiences.
The Gordon Museum of Pathology, situated in King’s College London’s Guys Campus, is the largest pathology museum in the UK. The primary purpose of this museum is to train medical students to diagnose diseases through its impressive collection of 8,000 pathological specimens. Dr. Michael Truong, the Managing Director and Founder of ARTechs, completed his doctoral degree in Imaging Science & Biomedical Engineering at King’s College London and has been working with the collection at The Gordon Museum to improve learning outcomes for healthcare students.
ARTechs developed an e-learning platform which overlays interactive multimedia information onto a specimen through a mobile computing tablet. The platform has different layers of information including the orientation, pathology, clinical history and an audio commentary. Every specimen in the Gordon Museum is color-coded; the black labels are part of the Revision Section which are specimen that are used for teaching. “Every student is required to learn the revision section by heart.” Truong continues, “There are eight Revision Sections and each of them consists of 20-25 specimens. Students come in and study these specimens day-in and day-out.” The museum currently serves over 9,500 students and Truong hopes that one day students will create the content and then upload the medical information into the digital system.
A pilot study showed that students not only had better learning outcomes with the aid of AR, but also preferred using the e-learning platform over text and basic images. Truong believes that the reason why students learn better is because “[AR] engages with more of their senses. You have your visual and audio already correlated together… it’s much more immersive, engaging, and exciting.”
AR has broad applications outside of medicine and ARTechs has developed exciting partnerships with several other local museums and galleries in London. ARTechs offers integrated services for arts and culture institutions where these institutions can have a cohesive digital presence from their website to virtual tours, and finally in AR experiences.
The next big development on ARTechs’ horizon is an exciting collaboration with the King’s College London’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies to create an online curation resource of biblical scripture, artworks and comparative theological commentary. Examples of artworks will include masterpieces such as Titian’s Assunta (Assumption [of the Virgin Mary into Heaven]), and Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo (The Creation of Adam), both of which had profoundly influenced theology. The resource will be accompanied by an augmented-reality Bible which will overlay the comprehensive visual commentary on scripture.