“Designing a Portable High-Definition Stereoscopic Camera System for Capturing Cultural Content” by Bendis

Part of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s expansion includes initiatives to explore virtual reality projects designed to present art, historical, and cultural content as well as multi-site live experiences. One of the challenges is the creation of high quality virtual reality cultural content.

A guiding doctrine of the museum is that its core competency is not the mastery of diverse, complex technologies but the creative use of them. And to that end the high definition camera system would not be engineered, but built from off-the-shelf components and assembled to meet the Museum’s needs. One of those needs would be transportability and a battery powered independence. Similarly, the post-production would be accomplished using off-the-shelf software and hardware and if possible off-the-shelf display technologies as well.

The Museum’s development of a high-definition stereoscopic camera has been in collaboration with, and is a direct continuation of, the projects and experiments initiated by New Media at Case Western Reserve University.