Yorkshire Sculpture Park: Satellite Navigation brings sculptures to life

The User

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is an open-air museum in West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. The park covers more than 200 hectares and hosts one of the largest exhibitions of bronze statues in Europe. Unlike similar parks, the YSP has a changing exhibition programme, allowing visitors to closely observe works by British and international artists.

The challenge

Museums and exhibition centres are experimenting with new technologies to change the way visitors interact with artworks. Digital and mobile technologies can offer museum or exhibition visitors new ways to actively engage with culture and artworks. Indeed, devices as common as smartphones can allow us to know more about a piece of art, the artist who created it, or the space where it is exhibited.  

The YSP wanted to broaden its audience using new media and digital technologies. In 2017, the Park assigned Amsterdam based interactive media design studio Moniker, to come up with an innovative way to offer visitors an immersive visit of the Park’s sculptures.

This became Sculpture Cam: a collaborative social game that visitors can play while inside the park. Users need to open their browsers on the web app and turn on the in-built geo-location service of their tablets or smartphones.  

The satellite solution

Using Sculpture Cam players are challenged to find ten sculptures in the park, including works by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Sophie Ryder, based on their silhouettes and on the satellite navigation embedded in their devices. Once they spot a sculpture, they will have to find the angle matching the silhouette on their screen and photograph it with their smartphones or tablets. When visitors submit their pictures, they are rewarded with an animation showing all the angles of the statues photographed by different visitors together with a curiosity or a fun fact about the artist behind the sculpture.

The sculptures in the park are geo-tagged via satellite navigation in the browser and photographed using Web Real Time Communication. 

The results

Thanks to the app, the tablets or smartphones of the visitors of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park turn into collaborative 3D scanners, which capture and collect the peculiar views of each visitor. All the pictures taken are collected and showcased on a screen in the Park’s museum. 

The web app was developed by Moniker with support from The Space, the England Arts and Culture Council and the BBC. It has been used by almost 3000 visitors, while the website counts more than 25.000 visits. In the future, the app might also include Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) features to further enrich the visitor’s experience.

With Sculpture Cam, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park is able to offer a distinctive experience to its visitors, widening access and participation to both arts and digital technologies. 

Luna Maurer, Studio Moniker

With Sculpture Cam, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park is able to offer a distinctive experience to its visitors, widening access and participation to both arts and digital technologies.