ZooSphere - automatically generated high-resolution insect images
Client
Exposé
The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin houses more than 30 million objects, including fossils, minerals and animal sound recordings. The insect collection makes up the largest part of the collection with 15 million objects.
Innovative digitization technologies have been developed for several years as part of the museum's collection development. For example, ZooSphere, a technology that produces high-resolution 360-degree images of insects, was developed between 2013 and 2015.
The device behind the ZooSphere technology consists of a frame with a swing - which carries the respective insect - and two motors. They move the swing and rotate the animal around itself. The camera itself is mounted on a mobile sled and takes pictures from different focal points of the object. This creates an image with a particularly large depth of field.
The ZoosSphere image sequences meet the requirements of researchers to reproduce even the smallest surface features, transparent and shiny parts and the finest colour nuances. This makes them relevant for taxonomic research and knowledge transfer.
By collaborating with Interactive Scape and integrating ZooSphere sequences into the interactive multi-touch table, a tangible and engaging user experience was created that can be used in a variety of ways.
