Coloring Books Pages For the SFO Museum Aviation Collection
We have launched a new experimental feature on the SFO Museum Aviation Website: Coloring book pages (or sheets) for a subset of the objects in our collection. Coloring books are PDF files with a stylized, black and white outline of an object for you to print out and color as you see fit and can be thought of as a second attempt at producing a museum artifact that can follow you “out of the building”.
This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on December 18, 2023 and tagged collection, rustlang, golang, roboteyes, publications and coloringbooks.
Experiments in Photogrammetry
This is a blog post about using consumer-grade hardware and a suite of open-source software tools to generate high-quality 3D models from photographic imagery, a process commonly referred to as “photogrammetry”, which can be viewed and interacted within a web browser. This is a fairly technical blog post but the non-technical takeaways are: It’s possible, it’s affordable or at least meaningfully cheaper than it used to be, it’s harder than it should be, we have developed tooling to make things easier and we would love your help to make it all better.
This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on November 29, 2023 and tagged swift, 3d, photogrammetry and blender.
Extracting Subjects from Images in Swift (and gRPC)
In the Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Website blog post I introduced the swift-text-emboss Swift package, a wrapper library around Apple’s Vision Framework to simplify extracting text from images. In this blog I’d like to introduce the swift-image-emboss Swift package. Like the swift-text-emboss package this is also a wrapper around code provided by Apple’s Vision Framework with the goal simplifying the code necessary to extract, or “lift”, one or more subjects from an image.
This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on October 31, 2023 and tagged swift, tools, grpc, golang and roboteyes.
Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Website
We want to see what these technologies make possible, though, and a very real and immediate opportunity is the ability to index search terms that the curators and registrars haven’t already included in the titles or descriptions for objects in our collection. For example, this travel bag from Canadian Pacific Airlines, covered in the names of cities the airline traveled to, is not included in the search results for the terms “montreal” or “saskatoon” using the default search functionality but it’s the first result when we also search for the text in images.
This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on September 14, 2023 and tagged search, swift, collection, roboteyes, grpc and tools.
Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Past Galleries (and Exhibitions) Along a Route
Not all past exhibitions in past galleries displayed along a route in the SFO Museum Wayfinding system have studio-quality photographs of their objects but for many of those exhibitions we have “installation” photos and those will be integrated in to the Wayfinding system shortly.
This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on September 12, 2023 and tagged wayfinding.
Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Past exhibitions for galleries along a route
SFO Museum has been producing exhibitions since 1980 and if people sometimes have trouble wrapping their heads around what’s on display today it’s easy to imagine that most people have no idea what we’ve done in the past (and that we’ve been doing it for over 40 years). By including past exhibitions in wayfinding routes and publications we’re hoping to show people not only all the cool and interesting stuff we’ve displayed over the years but also the breadth and velocity of that work to help reenforce the idea that “the airport is the museum”.
This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on August 16, 2023 and tagged wayfinding.
Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - EPUB (ebook) publications
This is a short blog post to announce that we have enabled support for generating publications of all the SFO Museum galleries and exhibitions and public art works from the San Francisco Arts Commission along a wayfinding route as EPUB documents.
This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on July 10, 2023 and tagged wayfinding and epub.
Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Interface changes, WebShare and Nearby
Since the last blog post about adding custom publications for wayfinding routes we’ve made the following changes and improvements: Lists and thumbnail views for route steps, galleries and public art works along a route and objects from the SFO Museum Aviation Collection related to a flights; When supported by the browser the Web Share API has been enabled for linking to (and sharing) individual routes; The new “nearby” feature allows you to find galleries, public art works and other waypoints close to arbitrary points inside the SFO terminal complex.
This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on July 03, 2023 and tagged wayfinding, nearby, ios and geo.
Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Publications
Custom publications are a first attempt at designing and producing artifacts which can be thought to “follow a visitor out of the building” (or the museum (which also happens to be the airport)). Think of them as training wheels towards acheiving that goal. We believe that the objects and public art works on display at SFO Museum and SFO are worth seeing in person but that doesn’t, and shouldn’t, preclude the ability to enjoy these things when you are not at SFO.
This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on June 12, 2023 and tagged wayfinding, golang and publications.