Virtual Louvre

Abstract

The goal of this project is to allow anyone to feel a bit of the Louvre of 1923. Generated browsable rooms at scaled proportions will display some of the artworks that were here in 1923. The user will be able to walk through the differents rooms and to discover informations about the exposed paintings.

Data processing is done with python and makes extensive use of pandas, regex and web scraping. The virtualisation uses Unity3D.

Motivation

Wandering between the Greek statues and the multi-centenary paintings of the Louvre, we might be tempted to forget that museum themselves have a history. Displays are not immutable. With the digitalization, museum have a new opportunity to made their collections available. But a virtual collection is not a virtual museum. A museum, through its rooms and the links made between the artworks by disposition choices, is a media, an experience. Therefore, allow the user to walk virtually through the rooms of the Louvre and see which paintings were in each room is the best way to make sense of the information that the catalogue offers to us.

Description and evaluation of the methods

Formal description of the source

The catalogue is constituted of :

• A map of a part of the first floor of the Louvre, on a double page
• An introduction (not used in the project)
• A list of abbreviations.
• A list of paintings, grouped by national schools
• Labeled illustrations of some paintings, scattered through the list.

An item in the list has the form number author (lifespan) title position

• Number can be an index taken from the main catalogue range of unique ID or from collection-specific ranges. In the latter case, the number is indicated in parentheses. It can also be a star * or “S. N°” (without number).
• Author and lifespan works together as a block. Paintings are grouped by author. When a painting has the same author as the previous one, the block is replaced by a dash.
• Titles are not disambiguated nor universal. There are cases where multiple paintings have the same title and the same author. Some title does not match exactly the “official title” of the painting.
• Position are the name of the room in which the painting is. In some cases, they are followed by the cardinal direction of the wall on which the painting is. If the position is partially or totally the same as the previous position, the common part is replaced by a dash.

A labeled illustration is constituted of a black and white image of a painting and a caption indicating the number of the painting and the last name of the author, in capitals.

Description of final interface

/TODO >100 words

Milestone

Schedule

Progress	Artwork retrieval	Map processing	Virtualisation
Done	Parsing of the catalogue	Creation of a GUI	Generation of a room
	Connection with wikidata
To be done
	Connection with other databases	Use of the GUI	Painting and doors generation
	Retrieval of the catalogue pictures	Consistency of room names	User interface and camera
	Link everything together

Tasks

Catalogue parsing

Around 2200 out of 2700 artworks have been parsed. Improvement is limited due to OCR.

Online database scraping

Scraping wikidata allowed us to get around 300 pictures of paintings (out of 2200). As no online database seems to be exhaustive enough, we need to multiply the sources to get as much pictures of paintings as possible and deal with inconsistencies across the different databases. We plan to introduce an index of confidence for the picture, and to use the picture of painting of the catalogue itself.

Map processing

A small GUI has been created using tkinter to allow us to perform room identification in a systematic way. We need to perform the manual extraction and labelling of the rooms. The consistency of the room names with the catalogue's one need to be ensured.

Room generation in unity

Instead of generating the whole Louvre in one go, we take advantage of the video game oriented features of Unity3D to create each room on their own and travel between them through "gates". We are taking as input a list with walls and generate it in unity. We choose to define each wall as an object with two points and an orientation (north, west etc). we still need to add the generation of the doors.

Painting generator

We have to create the paintings at the right size displaying the author and the description. And then attach it to the right wall.

User environment

Creation the player and the possibility to interact with the environment must be done.

Linking everything together

The whole pipeling is almost complete. We need to map the pythonic room and artworks representation to a Unity3D one and agree on a data storage structure.