Digital Twins of Textile Heritage: Impermanence and Touch through AI at The Historical Collection
Summary
OsloMet’s Department of Art, Design and Drama holds The Historical Collection, built up over 150 years: textile and material samples, garments, patterns, teaching materials and student works, reaching back to the department’s founding in 1875. Because the artefacts are fragile, much of the collection remains inaccessible for teaching and public engagement. This project creates documentary prototype digital twins of three to five selected textiles, pairing macro photography with 3D Gaussian splatting to capture soft, frayed and partially translucent surfaces, and converting one twin to Unreal Engine 5 with cloth simulation. A second, exploratory layer uses diffusion-based tools to produce clearly labelled speculative visualisations of damaged or missing areas. Two working meetings — one with the collection’s custodians, one with technical experts — settle methods, ethics and rights before any artefact is handled. The project leaves a documented capture workflow, a metadata template, a method report, and a rights-cleared sample twin, following Collections as Data principles.
Work Package
Primary WP: WP6
Duration
2026
People
- Project leader: Jannicke Johansen