A novel approach to documenting artifacts at the Gold Museum in Bogota

We present our work on novel digitizing techniques to create virtual exhibitions in the context of the Gold Museum in Bogotá, Colombia, a world renown space for precious pre-Colombian gold artifacts. In order to solve issues related to high specular reflection in gold artifacts, we developed a multi-spectral approach that solves some of the shortfalls of many commercial scanners. We also integrated commercial haptic devices into a new virtual installation that allows visitors to touch, hear, and see virtual approximations of the real objects. As an evaluation methodology, we compare the results of a scanner with normal light with our approach, and we also present results from user studies on our virtual installation. & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.