If you follow the cultural heritage scene online (especially on LinkedIn or Sketchfab), you might have come across Thomas Flynn. Not only does he post on related topics pretty frequently, but he also produces his own 3D models through photogrammetry. Up until pretty recently, he headed up the cultural heritage group at Sketchfab, and before that he helped bring the British Museum into the 3D age by kickstarting the process of scanning items in their collections. These days, he’s consulting about digital preservation best practices and helping organizations to protect their assets for the future.
Getting started
To begin with, what is cultural heritage? Many posts on VR Voyaging relate to it, but maybe it’s never defined very well. Put simply: cultural heritage encompasses a shared history, identity, and bond to the past with a group or society. This can mean language, traditions, dance, architecture, and so much more. For our purposes though, we’re focusing on the artistic output of society – 2D and 3D art like paintings, sculptures, and structures.
Thomas Flynn’s fascination with cultural heritage began in childhood, visiting local historic houses and museums. In the US, there are plenty of museums and collections to visit if you look around enough, but living in the UK, as he did, means historic houses, estates, and items are more woven into the fabric of society and part of life. Visiting these local places as a child with his family was both educational and fun, with various events and activities to spark his curiosity. Getting to see history up close and personal made it exciting. He also tells me he grew up enjoying games relating to history!
Thomas studied audio engineering in college and got his start working in short films and corporate videos. It wasn’t what he was looking for though and he started teaching himself Adobe Flash and web development skills. He worked for performing arts centers making animations and web sites, which ended up opening the door for some work at the British Museum for their web team. This was only a short-term contract though. He loved working there and the fact that they allowed employees to visit galleries before and after visitors were there for the day. This led him to thinking about ways to stand out – hopefully to lead to a longer-term work arrangement. After seeing some interesting projects people were showing off on Tumblr, he came upon the idea of trying his hand at digital artifact preservation.
What is digital preservation?
In its simplest form, preservation is all about capturing the details of a real-world item. Whether it’s a 2D image from a DSLR camera, a flatbed scanner, or a drone, it’s all a record of an item from a single view. For 3D captures, there are methods like photogrammetry with hundreds or thousands of 2D images or point clouds using laser and LiDAR scan data. The end result is a digital twin of the item, often produced using a combination of capture methods.
Flynn started scanning items and using cloud-based software to convert the images to 3D models. As an early pioneer of this, especially at the museum, he knew it was likely to get some attention if he did it right. It’s more than the cool factor – it’s a whole new way of engaging with the public. By removing physical and geographical barriers to their collections, 3D modeling opens up new possibilities for exploration and education. It can be used for cataloging, online browsing, and even within the museum to allow a more interactive look at an item behind glass.
Walking the halls of the galleries before and after hours was always fun, but he knew the deeper truth: it’s not just the massive quantity of items on display to consider. Really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In reality, most museums keep the majority of their holdings in storage. There just isn’t enough space to display it all, and the volume of items to preserve often outstrips the capacity of curators to inspect, clean/restore, and catalog everything. Scanning was a great way to enable those tucked-away items to be seen too.
Thomas was able to work with various curators outside of his normal schedule and began taking pictures of items from every angle to see what the results would be. The results were a bit lacking by today’s standards, but for the time, they represented the cutting edge. Folks within the museum were excited to see the potential and allowed him to start uploading some of the work to a 3D game model web site called Sketchfab.
Though he looks back at it with some wincing, it’s important to see what early projects like this looked like. Checking out his account on Sketchfab, you can still find his first public work from ten years ago. Even if it’s not up to the modern standards, it’s still a great look at what he was able to accomplish with no special equipment or access. He walked around the model and took lots of photos! You can do the same thing today to get started without anything more specialized.
It was clear that the ability to upload and display this kind of work with no special software needed was a game-changer. Suddenly, he could just send a link to a colleague or embed a model in another page. There is little true competition in this space now and there was even less then. Suddenly, it was like sharing videos on YouTube. Downloads were manageable, you didn’t need to host big files and special servers on your network, and people could see your work as intended.
A GLAMorous life (sorry, Tom!)
GLAM is the general term for the types of groups that tend to manage cultural heritage collections: Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums. It’s such a great acronym! These are the institutions that house and display the 2D and 3D items and have the greatest need for strategies to protect them while sharing them with the public.
After some changes to the digital teams at the British Museum, it seemed like time to move on. From there, he co-founded the Museum in a Box initiative. This innovative concept paired up a collection of heritage items with RFID tags. When an item (and its RFID tag) was tapped against the physical box, narration or other audio would play to give it context. It was like a collection of items and an expert to talk about it all in one. Get it, it’s a museum in a box! These boxes could be created by anyone with the right skills. For schools or other institutions who lacked the skills or time, they could also be commissioned by the Museum in a Box staff. It was a great way to bring cultural heritage exploration to broad audiences in a way that was much more accessible than travelling to a museum or gallery.
Sketchfab
Having collaborated with Sketchfab while at the British Museum, Thomas continued to cross paths with them and their founder Alban Denoyel. When a full-time position opened up for a Cultural Heritage Lead, he knew it was a perfect fit. During his time at Sketchfab, Flynn was at the forefront of 3D technology, contributing to the democratization of 3D content. He played a key role in curating and sharing 3D scans, allowing users worldwide to experience cultural heritage in a new dimension. He was able to work with various institutions to help them digitize their assets and post them online.
In the process of doing that, it became apparent that many places didn’t know how to get started or where to look for guidance in this process. This led him to documenting these critical aspects of digital preservation. To that end, he co-founded GLAM3D.org to centralize information on how to plan and implement a robust strategy no matter how big or small the institution and whatever their collection might be comprised of. The site continues to this day and is an incredibly useful place to figure out how it all works.
Up until the acquisition by Epic Games, Sketchfab continued to be a great fit, although cultural heritage was only ever a niche bit of the overall collection of 3D models (gaming-related models dominate the platform). A system designed for these kinds of artifacts would likely have a strong foundation of metadata. Metadata answers questions like “where is the item”, “where and when was it found”, “how old is it”, “what material is it”, and other such details.
Sketchfab never added a robust metadata system (the ability to associate these details) since it wasn’t generally useful enough across the board. On the other hand, Thomas points out that there’s always a balance to be made between using a general-purpose system like Sketchfab and a purpose-built catalog made for the domain. Many institutions are wary of just using a third-party system that they don’t control. What happens if they change their license or pricing, or worse still, go out of business?
Consulting
Since leaving Sketchfab (now Epic Games), Thomas has shifted to supporting GLAM organizations in a broader sense. While Sketchfab remains a great way to make a collection available to the public, it’s probably best being one part of a strategy. Presenting at conferences, contributing to papers, and speaking to individual places lets him connect more deeply with different organizations’ needs and help them to make informed choices about their processes. This may involve talking about scanning different types of artifacts, how to store the resulting files, cataloging, viewing, and how to best leverage their assets for their own uses and for sharing and collaboration.
Virtual (and Other Realities)
In case you’re wondering, although VR comes up in discussions, many of the people involved in digital preservation just don’t have enough exposure to it yet to know where to begin. There’s also the continued barrier that many people don’t have headsets. At VR Voyaging, we argue that the real shame is that people who enjoy content like this simply don’t realize that they need to get a headset! It’s still more common to see in-person VR experiences at special venues (selling tickets instead of apps). These often draw sizeable audiences which is nice to see but doesn’t necessarily translate into buying a device at home/work.
Thomas points out that a final barrier is that it requires lots of tedious effort to take the 3D model and make it look good for standalone headsets, PC VR (often with high-end gaming hardware), Web VR, and augmented reality. Models like the Meta Quest 3 are quite affordable and offer a good balance of performance and cost, but platforms like Sketchfab don’t optimize the models for each medium so you risk a nauseating stutter if you view a massive model on the “wrong” device. Being able to publish once to view it everywhere (think of how YouTube delivers different sizes of a video) could open up some new avenues.
Closing
As every worldwide conflict shows us, the need to protect our global history is ever present. Items can be lost, stolen, or otherwise destroyed. If the worst happened, we would want the best digital copies of our shared heritage to learn from. Photos in a book just aren’t enough. Properly done digital copies are the next best thing if you don’t have access to the original. Understanding how to make this happen is critical. Thankfully, Thomas Flynn continues to work to support digital preservation around the world. He gets to visit amazing places, see some fascinating work, and meet the incredible people making things happen. Seems like a pretty great job!
More of his work
If you’re interested in following Thomas’ work, you can subscribe to his monthly newsletter or follow his blog. He also posts a weekly highlight of his top ten favorite Sketchfab models from around the world on LinkedIn. There’s so much out there to see and he has a great eye for picking out a good selection.
