Digital Projection brings Michaelsberg Abbey to life

Digital Projection’s Satellite MLS system with Multi-View 3D projection technology has been used to help reconstruct Michaelsberg Abbey – a 1,000-year-old Benedictine church in the UNESCO world heritage site of Bamberg, Germany – at a new exhibition in Switzerland. Deep Fakes: Art and its Double is being held at EPFL Pavilions in Lausanne and is described as a unique showcase of the emerging digital culture of the art world.

The 1,000m² exhibition is “the culmination of several years of new creative practices emerging from the world of computer science,” explained the exhibition’s curator, EPFL Pavilions director Sarah Kenderdine, who has named the artefacts on display as “cultural deep fakes”. Exhibits include The Next Rembrandt, which uses artificial intelligence to create a “new” work from the Dutch master, who lived and died in the 17th century; The Golden Calf by seminal media artist Jeffrey Shaw, which reveals itself only when the visitor has circled around its pedestal in a “dance of veneration”; and Abbey Saint Michel, Bamberg, a complete digital reconstruction of the interior of the 1,000-year-old monastery.

The physical Michaelsberg Abbey has been closed for renovations since 2012, when structural damage was discovered. As part of the restoration process, 3D laser scanning specialist ArcTron was commissioned by the city of Bamberg to create a high-resolution, photorealistic recreation of the church’s interior, which contains significant works of late-Renaissance and Rococo art, sculpture and architecture. For the exhibition, the Virtual Reality and Visualization Research group at Weimar’s Bauhaus University and spin-off company Consensive developed real-time rendering techniques for ArcTron’s 3D models, allowing them to be presented in immersive VR using Multi-View, Digital Projection’s multi-user 3D projection technology.

The Digital Projection system in Lausanne, which was also installed by Bauhaus University, comprises one INSIGHT Satellite MLS 4K HFR 360 projector, along with six pairs of Volfoni-made glasses. Using Multi-View’s ultra-fast frame rates (360fps), this single projector is able to provide a true 3D experience to several viewers, each of whom has a view of the exhibit that remains appropriate to their changing position. This allows the users to see and interact with each other in a truly shared collaborative manner.

“Instead of providing 120fps, which is enough only for single-user 3D, the INSIGHT Satellite MLS 4K HFR 360 delivers an unrivalled 360 frames,” confirmed Kenderdine. “Giving each user a unique perspective on an object provides us with unpredicted ways to collaborate.”