Mouthful of Dust

State Library Victoria is tasked with preserving and providing public access to the Ned Kelly collection items. - Culture: How can Ned Kelly be presented in a way that provides contemporary, diverse perspectives on Australia’s past, present and future? How can the Library support and celebrate culturally diverse Australian writers and artists? - Access: The collection items are on display at the Library in a restrictive climate-controlled cabinet, but how can visitors get close to the objects? See inside them? Experience them outside of Melbourne? - Technology: How can nascent 3D technologies be employed in-browser and embedded with rich immersive storytelling?

Through an innovative web design approach that seamlessly merges cinema and the web, users can experience the collection and the writers’ work like never before. Employing photogrammetry, LiDAR and nascent Gaussian splatting technologies, Mouthful of Dust centres around high-resolution scans of the collection items. Accompanying the scans are new writing commissions by five esteemed Australian writers from diverse backgrounds. Responding to the objects, their spoken stories and speculations add new layers of interpretation and suggest different ways of knowing these historic objects. The experience is free, browser-based, built on standard HTML5 web technologies, real-time rendered, fully responsive and highly accessible.

Mouthful of Dust has vastly increased the accessibility of the Library’s most popular collection objects to people living in outside of metropolitan Melbourne, as well as elderly and less mobile people. Through an engaging cinematic digital experience, it successfully prototypes innovative forms of curatorial interpretation that investigate colonial collections through considered artistic intervention. The design solution is introducing thousands of people to diverse, nuanced viewpoints that they don’t encounter in their filter bubbles. The project has developed a framework and toolset that will be used for other collections. The code is also open-sourced for other institutions to implement and adapt.

Some key features include: - Highly engaging storytelling by some of Australia’s leading contemporary writers. - High-quality real-time rendered 3D scans of culturally significant collection objects. - Advanced use of WebGL and nascent Gaussian splat technologies in browser. - Extensive accessibility features, including audio descriptions, captions, screen reader optimisation, reduce motion settings, full keyboard control, alt attributes, ARIA labels, and more. (Experience compliant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA guidelines.) - Bespoke iconography and animating graphic design elements. - Active and passive modes of engagement: ‘Manual’ mode gives the user autonomous control of the experience. ‘Cinema’ mode takes the user on a choreographed journeys in sync with the storytelling. - Bespoke manual navigation controls, allowing the user to intuitively move and zoom around objects with a single click or tap and drag. - Immersive sound design and dynamic camera animation. - Multiple levels of detail (LODs) and with real-time performance detection and auto graphics settings, enabling the experience to run on a wide range of devices with optimised performance. - Fully responsive (desktop, tablet and phone) and aspect-ratio agnostic (landscape and portrait).