Soluis’s dedicated Museums and Heritage division is a recognised innovator in illustrating and preserving heritage assets, and in enabling access to digital heritage experiences and content for audiences of all kinds.
Our team has amassed 15+ years of experience in presenting heritage architecture, digital preservation, and digital interpretation through CGI and animation. We have developed an informed and nuanced understanding of both our subject matter, and the latest visualisation and digital access methodologies.
As a part of the wider Soluis Group, we also offer an integrated set of skills and expertise, and over 1,500 projects worth of experience in harnessing new virtual and augmented reality technologies to bridge the gap between heritage data and the user. We can create everything from imagery and animation to full, multi-format digital interpretation installations accessed by 1000’s of people.
Our work in this space has seen us collaborate with some of Museums and Heritage’s leading names, and on some lighthouse heritage visualisation projects; including The British Museum, Avanti, NVA, Skara Brae, Bamburgh Castle, National Museum of Scotland, St Peter’s Seminary, Samsung Digital Discovery Centre, Aberdeen Music Hall, Transport for London, Architecture and Design Scotland, Glasgow Caledonian University and The University of St Andrews.
Recent Press:
NBC NEWS Article
http://www.nbcnews.com/mach/innovation/virtual-reality-bringing-these-lost-worlds-back-life-n722006
Museums + Heritage Advisor Article
Recent Projects:
British Museum Rock Art VR:-
As part of the African Rock Art Image project (britishmuseum.org/africanrockart) at the British Museum, Soluis Heritage has created a free virtual reality (VR) mobile application, Rock Art VR, which transports users to world-famous rock art site at Game Pass Shelter in South Africa.
The app takes users on a journey through Maloti-Drakensberg National Park, home of the renowned Game Pass Shelter rock art site, flying over mountain ranges and exploring pathways leading to the sites. Using digital imagery, the app uses VR technology optimised for cardboard headsets to allow people to explore the rock art and its surroundings via an immersive 360° tour with embedded audio from the project curator
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Created as part of a project looking at innovative and exciting ways to connect people with Africa’s rock art, the app was first shown at the Digital Activity Day event in the Great Court in the British Museum. This event gave families the opportunity to try the VR experience, whilst also handling 3D prints and contributing to a paper ‘rock art’ wall.
Steve Colmer, Director at Soluis Heritage said: “The Digital Activity Day was great to be involved with and I got to see first-hand the reactions to the content we had created. Especially the kids that took to it straight away and were really immersed as they journeyed up the mountain and nervously peered over the edge of the trail down to the valley below.
The team at the British Museum and olleagues at the African Conservation Trust in South Africa were a joy to work with, and we were able to use their endless knowledge of both the site and the artwork to help shape the experience and guide us every step of the way.“
The Rock Art VR application can be downloaded here on the Apple store, or Google Play store.
Desktop version:- http://vr.africanrockart.britishmuseum.org/
English Heritage VR Experiences
Soluis are about to embark on a exciting new partnership together with English Heritage and VR technology providers HTC, to recreate several of their world famous landmark in Virtual Reality, allowing the visitor to experience the castles as they once were many hundreds of years in the past. The visitors will be able to explore the environment virtually and learn about the location’s relevance and impact on English history from the historical characters that were around at that time.
LiDAR to Virtual Reality and Film
Laser scanning is playing an increasingly prevalent role within the heritage, museum, construction and geo-spatial industries. It is being used for survey, digital preservation, pre-visualisation and research. Through laser scanning we are beginning to digitise the world to unprecedented levels of detail.
However, the technology to fully appreciate LiDAR data, to interact with it, to feel the presence and intimacy of the raw data currently lags behind the scanning technology itself. Existing dedicated software solutions are often expensive, ‘clunky’ and lack usable levels of experiential engagement.
Our vision is to enhance the value of point clouds, to remove cost barriers to post processing and technical expertise, and to allow raw LiDAR data to be experienced in immersive platforms such as walk-in domes and virtual reality hardware.
We want you to step inside your point clouds, walk and fly around in 360 degrees of view with smooth intuitive navigation, hugely increased spatial awareness and genuine user presence to unlock the inherent beauty of LiDAR data.
We showcased this technology at the Museum and Heritage show courtesy of Mollenhauer, who at the event laser scanned the exhibition floor, we demonstrated these results projected in our walk-in dome that gave the experience of interactively walking/flying through the show.
Prospect North: Venice Biennale 2016
The Scottish Government commissioned a national exhibit to represent Scotland at the 2016 Venice Biennale festival. The response from the dynamic design collective appointed was ‘Prospect North’ –an exhibit that focuses on Scotland’s past present and future.
Crucially, AR and VR content allows us to tie back and ‘transport’ the viewer to Scotland from Venice, using the physicality of the sculptural components to act as direct triggers for video and graphical content. This content then allows Scotland and its communities to tell their own stories.
The final exhibit consisted of an augmented sculpture, augmented artwork, augmented plinths and multiple VR experiences.
Bronze Age VR:- British Museum
Soluis were asked to provide a unique interactive experience focusing on the Bronze Age at a dedicated weekend event sponsored by the SDDC [Samsung Digital Discovery Centre] at the British Museum. This involved providing the digital recreation of a Bronze Age roundhouse with various artefacts. Visitors were able to experience this via the immersive reality dome or one of the many Samsung Gear VR headsets that were available.
Our specialist heritage team worked closely with the education team and the Bronze Age curator at the British Museum to define an experience that would allow visitors to become immersed in this defining age in Britain’s history.
The main part of the exhibit was a digital recreation of a roundhouse dwelling that was initially based on a photogrammetry capture of a physical reconstruction on the Isle of Arran. There were also models of various artefacts that had been produced from existing digital scans.
The immersive reality dome provided a prominent centerpiece to the exhibition and attracted a steady flow of visitors. This experience was also replicated using virtual reality headsets that enabled each visitor to step back in time to experience this digital snapshot of bronze age Britain.
The museum received excellent publicity and press coverage around this innovative use of digital technology to enhance the experience visitors have when exploring the nations’ heritage. The feedback from visitors was particularly positive and has since provided the basis upon which to base plan a series of similar events that build upon this success.
TFL 150 Years of the London Underground
To celebrate the 150 year anniversary, of the London Underground, Transport for London were keen to communicate to as wide an audience as possible the massive impact that the tube network has had on London over this period. From its highly innovative civil engineering to key moments such as protecting Londoners during WW2, the London Underground has played a key role in the development of London as a global economic centre and to its millions of citizens every day.
Soluis were tasked with developing a punchy and compelling presentation from a significant amount of statistical information, old photographs and flyers from the tube network. There wasn’t sufficient budget available to undertake location filming around the network so we were reliant on piecing together the limited content that Transport for London could make available to us.
From the outset it was clear that a motion graphics led approach was going to be essential. We employed a wide range of graphical treatments to bring the stillimagery we had to life – including parallax treatments to give the impression of flying through the photographs as we journeyed through key moments in The Tube’s past.
Glasgow School of Art: Virtual Mackintosh Library & AR App
After the devastating fire that destroyed this architectural masterpiece in the spring of 2014, the process of bringing the library back from the ashes may have only just begun, but Soluis’ application of new technology to heritage data has enabled an astonishing user experience in the meantime.
Working together with Avanti architects Soluis Heritage created an AR app for their bid to restore Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s fire damaged Glasgow School of Art building.
This allowed the team to present their ideas within a white card 3D model of the School which appear when the tablet was placed over a printed image of the floor plan.
The architects could then slice through the building and highlight overlaid information for different usage of the spaces.
We have then gone on to use VR technology to let the user explore further the library space regarded as masterpiece within Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s most famous commission.
Using virtual reality headsets and walk -in dome projection you can experience a truly immersive environment something that would be impossible until the real world restoration of the library is complete.
“Touching the Neolithic” VR Dome Installation: National Museum of Scotland
Orkney’s incredible world heritage site Skara Brae has been recreated digitally by Soluis. The digital Skara Brae house was generated through photogrammetry, captured on-site as tone-mapped HDR imagery of the main spaces and passageways. Our walk-in virtual reality dome allows delegates to follow in the footsteps of Skara Brae’s neolithic inhabitants; an experience that really has to be seen to be believed
The Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae lies near the dramatic white sandy beach of the Bay of Skaill on Orkney. Skara Brae is the best preserved group of prehistoric houses in Western Europe. Uncovered by a storm in 1850, the site presents a remarkable picture of life around 5000 years ago.
As part of the National Museum of Scotland’s ‘Touching the Past’ exhibition, which aimed to facilitate new modes of museum engagement, Touching the Neolithic Investigated House 7 and it’s found artefacts as an immersive and interactive digital world.
An accurate 3D model of the house was created through photogrammetry with artefacts; a mysterious stone ball, a whale bone pin and fragment of pottery, captured through close range laser scanning.
Running in the museum’s Early People Gallery, visitors were presented with a walk in dome screen and a table top holding RFID embedded 3d printed replicas of the artefacts. Placing artefacts on a ‘hot spot’ triggered animations and narrative describing the object, it’s use and its place within the house.
The aim of the project was to forge stronger connections between ‘artefact’ and ‘place’ to provide greater insight and emotional engagement to the museum experience through immersive and interactive technology and to draw on the senses of ‘peripheral vision’ and ‘physical touch’.
St Peter’s Seminary
St Peters Seminary was a training college for the Catholic priesthood in the 60’s and 70’s. It is one of the greatest examples for post war modern architecture in Britain and been described by DOCOMOMO as a “building of world significance”.
The seminary was however closed in 1980 after only 14 years in use, having never reached its 100 student capacity. Ever since the buildings were closed their state has rapidly declined.
Soluis have been working on an in-house R&D project to create a multi-platform visual restoration of the main buildings since early 2015, harnessing games engine technology and immersive hardware to place users in this world-renowned building fabric.
Carrawburgh Mithraeum Digital Museum
Outside the fort of Carrawburgh on Hadrian’s Wall, a temple dedicated to the Eastern god Mithras was excavated in 1950. The temple was built to emulate the sacred cave where Mithras was born, and the interplay between darkness and light – Mithras was a god of light – were integral to the rituals and ceremonies of the followers of Mithras.
The mythology surrounding Mithras is incomplete, and there are many aspects of the cult that we do not understand. However, we know that Mithras was a god of light and good-fortune, and he was popular with soldiers and merchants. Born from a rock in a cave, temples dedicated to Mithras, known as Mithraeum, were built to emulate this type of setting and can be found across the Roman Empire.
The mithraeum at Carrawburgh contained three altars at the far end of the temple, in the most sacred space. Every mithraeum would also have displayed a scene known as a tauroctony – the slaying of the bull, but no sculpture of this sort was found at Carrawburgh. The corner fragment of a tauroctony, however, was found at the next fort to the west along Hadrian’s Wall at Housesteads, as were statues of Mithras’ attendants, Cautes and Cautopates.
The app was created in conjunction with Newcastle University Digital Heritage department as a virtual museum and a showcase for a series of highly detailed laser scans of the altars and statues
Digital Interactive Audience Engagement:
Players Experience SPVRS: Tottenham Hotspur Football Club
Soluis worked together with the football club and the design architects responsible for their headquarters at Lilywhite house to provide a range of the latest cutting-edge technology for the new sales suite. The primary aim was to be able to use the latest in digital immersive reality to enable club sales and marketing staff to offer an effective corporate hospitality experience by bringing key sections of the proposed new stadium to life.
Hotelympia – Walk-in Immersive Reality Experience
To support the Fresh Montgomery, event agency’s with the Hotelympia event at London’s ExCel venue, we provided a walk-in immersive experience in which visitors can
virtually step inside three of London’s top hospitality destinations.
RESI Event Interactive Property Marketing
Soluis were represented at the RESI, the leading events for the residential property market. This video captures the enormous interest we had from property developers of all types and provides a flavour of some of the solutions we can provide to help move audiences from interest to engagement.
Carlson Rezidor Annual Business Conference
Soluis were asked to support Radisson BLU in presenting BluPrint at their internal business conference for the Americas Region. The audience for this event would consist of several hundred senior staff for the region,along with numerous owner-operators – . The immersive walk-in virtual reality (VR) portal offered Radisson the chance to present a grandstand introduction to their new BLU.
Contact Details:
Email: fergus@soluis.com
London Studio: 0203 301 6321
Glasgow Studio: 0141 548 8686