3D Printing

3D Scanned and 3D Printed “Smart Replicas” Combine Past Beauty and Augmented Usability

Those among us who are museum goers and have an appreciation for the beauty of objects from centuries past must have felt frustrated by the minimal access that a museum can offer to these objects. That is because they are frail, priceless and irreplaceable. With today’s 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies that is no longer the case and the Smart Replicas project, by prolific Dutch artist Maaike Roozenburg, is exploring what can be achieved.

Through Smart Replicas, Studio Maaike Roozemburg and its partners investigated how 3D scanning, 3D printing and technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) can contribute to make museum artefacts accessible again while also increasing our knowledge of them. Smart Replicas is a project in which the worlds of museological heritage, design, art history, 3D prototyping and AR comes together.

Augmented Reality 3d printing

The term is used to define replicas of historical objects made usable again. The “smart” aspect describes the use of the AR to carry information from the museum to the final user of the Replica. Objects shaped and refined throughout history can thus be used again in the present. A group of students from the Graphic Design department at the Royal Academy of Art worked on structuring and shaping digitized historical information concerning the cups. They developed their own narrative and designed it in a matching medium.

CT scanner 3D Printing

One of the first projects was the reproduction of seven tea cups from the Boijmans Van Beuningen collection. A CT scan system was used to scan the object without the risk of damaging it. The resulting data was converted for digital reconstruction and the cups were produced both by milling porcelain castings moulds from the 3D models and by directly 3D printing them in ceramics.

3d printed Smart Replicas

To make Smart Replicas a reality Studio Maaike Roozenburg collaborated with a team made up by people of very different backgrounds and expertise, including academics, students, curators and technical experts from Delft University of Technology (Faculty of Industrial Design and Faculty of Civil Engineering), Delft Heritage, Department of Archaeology, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the AR Lab at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and students from Graphic Design of Royal Academy.

The result of this cooperative work can be seen trial installation at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, where the smart replica prototypes can be touched, used and tested by the public.

© Copyright 2017 | All Rights Reserved | 3D Printing Industry