Plantin-Moretus

Dissected Anatomy

For the printing museum in Antwerpen Haute Technique developed a digital interface to experience sixteenth century old books in an authentic manner. Three touchscreens placed in antique desks enable visitors of the museum to browse through these medieval books and explore additional background information regarding their typography, illustration and history.

The interface was designed to create an intuitive and non-obtrusive user-experience. With it’s fluent three-dimensional movement of bookpages, and zoomable high-resolution content, the interface really invites it’s users to take a closer look at the detailed prints and etchings.

Furthermore, tappable bookmarks refer to additional information and imagery. When tapping a bookmark, the book gracefully slides to the side, letting the viewer focus on the page in question. In the remaining screen area the interface will reveal a new layer containing in-depth information with rich text and beautiful imagery.

Backstory

Plantin-Moretus is a museum honouring the famous printers Christophe Plantin and Jan Moretus. The museum is situated in their former sixteenth century home in the city centre of Antwerp, and contains thousands of ancient books, letterpresses and typefaces.

For the exhibition ‘Anatomy Dissected’, the original print of Juan Valverde’s “Vivae imagines partium corporis humani" was digitised by taking extremely high resolution pictures of each of it’s pages. It was this collection of photographs that would eventually become the heart of the three-dimensional digital book.

Preserving the authentic character of the print in a digital 3D version was quite challenging. To avoid any compromises on visual quality, we decided early on that every small stain, fold and crack from the original book should be preserved in it’s digital counterpart. Which meant digitally cutting out every photograph of every page by hand. This resulted into the beautiful photorealistic end-result as it stands today.

Partners

In collaboration with


Kinkorn