Art of Ajanta - Large Video Wall (LVW)
One of the exhibits at the Virtual Experiential Museum on Ajanta currently live at the National Museum, New Delhi, India. The LVW is multi-projector interactive display system projected on a 7 m screen,with that you can experience the art of Ajanta at a scale close to that at the actual site. You can appreciate the Art of Ajanta and India through the Story of Simhala found in Cave 17, see the animation film Simhala Avadana, Sankhapala, and have a virtual walk around the Caves in Ajanta.
The paintings at Ajanta need a keen viewer. As you explore Simhala avadana in greater detail - you will realise Art of Ajanta is more than just beautiful figures and stunning geographies - the ancient artists created narratives that need a viewer’s participation to read the painting and unlock stories.
The Large Video consists of 4 major modes that are:
1. Autoplay Mode: the autoplay mode allows the user to sit back and enjoy the complete art of Ajanta as well as all the wonderful elements of the painting Simhala (Cave 17) with the help of an autoplay video clip. The autoplay mode gives the user flexibility to pause the video at any time and go back and explore the painting at any point in time.
2. Explore Mode: in the explore mode, the user can take his on time and explore the Simhala Painting. They can slide between the Original to Revisualised slider to view the line drawings or recolored version of the painting.
They can toggle on/off various Information assets which provide certain details of the paintings which would help them understand the aesthetics of the painting and give them more information about the painting.
The animation toggle would enable various animation icons over the screen which when tapped would enable them to view the animated portions of the painting, there is a toggle for viewing the revisualized portions of the paintings. Similarly the 3D toggle enables all the 3D icons on the painting which when clicked shows the 3D models of certain elements in the painting.
The story toggle when clicked shows the scene numbers on the LVW which can be clicked individually or a you can click the play story button to go through the entire story of the painting. The story of the painting is not linear and it is scattered across various locations on the painting, but with the ravages of time most portions of the paintings are missing, thanks to the scene numbers and the revisualised portions, now the users can view the entire story scene to scene.
The Zoom toggle enables a magnifying lens which they can use to view minute details in the painting in detail.
3. Animation Films: there are two animation films that are available for the users to view, they can select any film they want to watch.
4. Explore Cave: this mode allows the users to have a virtual walkaround the caves of Ajanta in 3D. Using simple navigation controls on the controller, the user can view the caves in Ajanta in detail.
Case 1: Working with multiple displays with different resolutions: The large video wall and its controller were of different resolutions i.e 6962x2160 and 1920x1080 respectively which caused some major UI and issues.
Proposed Solution: While testing we found out that unity had an issue due to which it scales all the displays to a particular resolution. Suppose you have a 4k monitor and a 2k monitor, the app when launched would be either 4k or 2k and would scale it on to both the screens.
So inside unity we kept both the resolutions at 6962x2160 since the controller only showed UI elements we scaled the canvas to 6962x2160 and made a panel of 1920x1080 on which all the UI elements were placed properly. The app when launched showed the proper UI on the controller and the large painting showed up on the LVW main display properly.
So inside unity we kept both the resolutions at 6962x2160 since the controller only showed UI elements we scaled the canvas to 6962x2160 and made a panel of 1920x1080 on which all the UI elements were placed properly. The app when launched showed the proper UI on the controller and the large painting showed up on the LVW main display properly.
Case 2: Incorporating a 64K painting image into unity for the best experience. Unity doesn't support images or textures above 8K.
Proposed Solution: We first created a plane in 3DS Max and sliced the plane into 8 segments with each segment being allotted a single texture and each texture had a resolution of 8K. Combined this whole plane had 8 textures of 8K which made us reach 32K and the painting was in superb quality.
