The Gold Coast is a coastal city in southeastern Australia and has been, since the 1980’s, a favourite tourist and surfing destination. The “Sculpting Our Waterways” project wants to create a digital museum to teach visitors about and celebrate the city’s biggest treasure, its waterways, by using a combination of 3D printing, augmented reality and mobile interactive technology.
As the name of the project suggests, 3D printing will have a key role in reproducing exact replicas of the area’s spectacular residential waterways. Residential canals were first built in the 1950’s and construction continues today, making the city something of a “Venice down under”, with more than 890 Km of residential waterfront land within the city.
Following what is rapidly becoming the perfect scheme for the museums of the future, these models will be integrated with Augmented Reality capabilities so that visitors will be able to visualize information on specific parts of each model, thus gaining an immediate and clear understanding of the waterways and the surrounding areas.
The project, which was presented at Gold Coast’s 2014 Bleach Festival last May, is still in the concept development phase but the “behind the scenes” video below shows very clearly what it intends to accomplish and how it will do it through 3D printing technologies. In fact the local Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF) has already granted seed funding to explore working prototypes, correctly identifying augmented reality and 3D printing as at the best way to convey the Queensland city’s uniqueness.
Sculpting Our Waterways: Behind The Scenes from Digital Cinematix on Vimeo.
