What kind of creative possibilities can be realised if digitised cultural data is made freely available and reusable? Skelex is another interesting and promising example of the German Open Cultural Data Hackathon Coding Da Vinci.
Skelex is a VR application that places a digital visitor into a virtual natural history museum. There he can do what is normally not allowed: he can touch and handle exhibits. More interactive possibilities allow for disassembling skeletons, enlarging and measuring, as well as displaying annotations and additional information that accompanies each part of the exhibit.
Skelex is a VR app that creates a unique immersive experience for the museum visitor or can be used as edutainment app at home or at school.
Skelex was developed by Lisa Ihde, Sebastian Schulz and Joana Bergsiek and won the audience award of the Open Cultural Data Hackathon ‘Coding da Vinci 2017’. Provider of the digital data was the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
Coding da Vinci is the first German open cultural data hackathon. Founded in Berlin in 2014, Coding da Vinci brings cultural heritage institutions together with the hacker & designer community to develop ideas and prototypes for the cultural sector and for the public. It is a joint project of Deutsche Digitalen Bibliothek (DDB), Open Knowledge Foundation Germany e.V. (OKF DE), Servicestelle Digitalisierung Berlin (digiS) and Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. (WMDE)
The code of Skelex is open source and available here.
A description of the Skelex project (in German) can be found here.
An illustrative video can be viewed here.