Pure land: Futures for embodied museography

This article describes the design and implementation of the Pure Land projects, consisting of two visualization systems and their respective applications, Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang [2012] and Pure Land Augmented Reality Edition [2012]. Each installation allows participants to engage in different ways with a full-scale augmented digital facsimile of Cave 220 from the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Mogao Grottoes, Gansu Province, northwestern China. This project is a collaboration between the Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALiVE), City University of Hong Kong, and the Dunhuang Academy. In the Pure Land projects, the digital facsimiles of this cultural paragon have been transformed, providing formative personal experiences for museum visitors. The projects integrate high-resolution digital archeological datasets (photography and 3D architectural models) with immersive, interactive display systems. This work is of great importance because the treasuries of paintings and sculptures at Dunhuang are extremely vulnerable to human presence and, in the case of Cave 220, permanently closed to public visitors. Comprehensive digitization has become a primary method of preservation at the site. Both installations have been shown to the public at a variety of museums and galleries worldwide - to critical acclaim. The projects contribute to new strategies for rendering cultural content and heritage landscapes and suggest the future for embodied museography. Here, each project is described in detail, including innovations in interface technological application and user experience.