The Drexel Digital Museum Project

The Drexel Digital Museum Project (DDM) is an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers focused on production, conservation and dissemination of new media for exhibition of historic fashion. Collaborators include: Drexel’s Colleges of Media Arts & Design, Computing and Informatics, the Hagerty Library iDEA E-Repository, and the Fox Historic Costume Collection; Seoul National University; École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; the Fulbright Foundation; and the Costume Society of America.

DDM imaging session. Left to right: Nick Jushchyshyn, Program Director Virtual Reality & Immersive Media; Daniel Caulfield-Sriklad, Fulbright Scholar; Kathi Martin, Director Drexel Digital Museum; Clare Sauro, Director Fox Historic Costume Collection

Charles James. Evening gown. 1948. Image Collection: Drexel Digital Museum. Object Collection: Fox Historic Costume Collection. 64.35.2. Gift of Mrs. William S.(Babe) Paley.

Our team has created prototype 3D interactive media, OBJECTVR , that allow the viewer to be an active participant in the exhibition of historic fashion. These images may be rotated 360 degrees, zoomed in and displayed at up to 3 times life size. We re-purpose the files as HTML5 to display on the world wide web. Rich metadata descriptions of the media , mapped to current standards of archiving, ensure their persistent discovery, access and conservation.

ObjectVR installation. James Galanos: Design Integrity. October 19- December 8, 2018, January 8-27, 2019, Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University.

Students from the Interactive Digital Media program designed an interface that gave the visitor control over the panorama and zoom.

The DDM is also developing galleries of fashion history as freely accessible resources for students and scholars.

Left: Evening Gown, Gilbert Adrian for Greta Garbo in the film Inspiration. 1931. Right: Adrian Gown Animation (in progress) by Sugandha Tomar using Clo 3D software.

Fashion design degrades in color and luster on exhibition and dressing stresses the garment. The DDM is investigating new technologies to represent fashions that are deemed to fragile for further exhibition. The high resolution image can be animated, placed on the cloud, and distributed to other collections around the world to be displayed without harming the original object.

Drexel Digital Museum collaborators.