The Smithsonian recently made a small portion of its collection available through its new X3D Explorer platform. In a strange invocation of the digital haptic, the organization describes this new form of encounter as “the end of ‘do not touch’.”
You can touch…but you just can’t feel.
About two weeks ago, a fire started at the archive.org scanning center in San Francisco. No one was hurt and, within 48 hours, employees were back at work scanning materials. According to the archive’s blog, they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cameras and scanning equipment, but most of their data was unaffected: Continue reading
KATHERINE GROO 