ICON

ICON addresses the desire of museums, the commercial art market and other custodians of cultural and design artefacts for a practical and affordable way to produce high-quality digitised 3D models. Historically only the very largest cultural institutions have had access to the expertise and equipment needed to undertake 3D digitisation of the quality that such artefacts demand. While recognising that 3D digitisation may never be a cheap option, ICON has developed a 3D digitisation pipeline that allows cultural institutions to better understand the cost of digitising a particular object, effectively manage the digitisation process and review and repurpose the resulting models for different commercial and curatorial applications.
Integrated with a leading museum and gallery collections management system, the ICON pipeline allows curators, conservators and gallery owners to directly engage with each stage in the digitisation of an artefact. Alternative versions of a model can be generated on-request, for example for embedding in a mobile viewer or inclusion in a rendered virtual scene, maximising the use that can be had from a single digitisation. A powerful multi-platform 3D viewer allows models to be viewed alongside related 2D imagery and supporting catalogue information. The commercial value of each model is further enhanced by a rich search interface, which can be integrated into any museum or gallery website and allows non-expert users to confidently identify and purchase models appropriate for a particular historical context or application.