At the invitation of the HK Art Fair 2012, City University of Hong Kong (CityU) is presenting “Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang”, a seminal research project that envisions the future of digital preservation, cultural heritage interpretation and an embodied museography, from 17–20 May at Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

The imagery is made visible on iPad screens that visitors use as mobile viewing windows to explore every feature of the actual cave within the perimeter of the HK Art Fair booth.

The presentation is an innovative augmented reality installation whereby the paintings and sculptures of the caves are rendered virtually with the architecture of the booth, which shares similar dimensions to those of Cave 220 at Dunhuang in the grottoes.

The highly original technical rendering of “Pure Land” is made possible by a number of infrared cameras in the booth that track the position and orientation of the iPads. Computers then create the appropriate views of the actual Dunhuang cave, which are sent to the iPads via a wi-fi connection

The walls of the HK Art Fair booth are covered with full-scale photographic prints that show laser scans of the architecture of Cave 220 made by the Dunhuang Academy. These also provide a structural and aesthetic alignment between the space of the booth and that of the cave.

The original laser scans have been converted into a 3D polygonal mesh, which form the virtual surface structure onto which the Dunhuang Academy’s high-resolution photographs of the Cave 220 paintings and sculptures are rendered. This composite 3D representation is what becomes viewable on the iPad screens.

The presentation at the HK Art Fair 2012 is a world’s first, showing the future of mobile media as a means of virtually embodying 1:1 scale cultural heritage experiences. It creates a space for the conjunction between real and virtual formations that gives transacted aesthetic expression to Dunhuang’s treasury of wall paintings and sculptures. It has been produced at the CityU Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media (ACIM).

Please download photos of visitors using iPads to view the features of Cave 220 at the exhibition at the following link: http://sweb.cityu.edu.hk/fionang/PureLand_HKART12_selected photos.zip

Media enquiries:

Fion Ng, School of Creative Media (Tel: 3442 7659 or 9133 9599)