Multimodal workflow for the creation of interactive presentations of 360 spin images of historical violins

The adoption of multimedia and multimodal applications inside museums and exhibitions is becoming a common practice. These installations proved to be particularly effective to attract visitors, especially the younger ones, and teach them complex information about the exposed artworks. A similar approach can be useful also to explain scientific analyses conducted on artworks, that commonly involve the use of complex analytical techniques, difficult to understand for inexpert people. In this work, we describe a multimodal workflow for the creation of interactive presentations of 360 spin images of historical violins. The workflow involves the acquisition, classification and visualization of the data. In particular, an ad hoc photographic set was built to achieve a fast acquisition of images both under visible and UV illumination, with the aim to study the surface of the instruments. Acquired images are classified and labeled using UVAnalyzer, an interactive application that supplies a set of tools for the analysis of UV fluorescence (UVF) images. Finally, KVN (Kinect Violin Navigator), a Kinect-based application, provides comfortable visualization and navigation within the data. During the development, we adopted a user-driven approach: user studies and suggestions from experts in UVF analysis were taken into account to improve the usability of the various steps of the workflow; then, a qualitative evaluation of the produced presentation was conducted on 22 volunteers. As a test set, we used images of violins exposed in the “Museo del Violino” in Cremona (Italy).