Getting the public to interact with a numismatic exhibition is not easy. Ancient coins, as well as modern ones, are often very small in size, making it complicated for visitors to see the details.
As part of the exhibition project “The Reggio Mint through the Centuries: iconography, culture, economy and politics from the classical to the modern age”, we set out to solve the problem of displaying numismatic artefacts to the public, aiming for maximum comprehension and quality of the message to be transferred.
We started from the study of what has been achieved so far in the field of numismatics with the most common multimedia displays and didactics, drawing the conclusion that numismatics seems to be a subject exhibited with multimedia languages not very comprehensible to the general public, which is extremely variegated in terms of cultural extraction and age, something which distinguishes most visitors to exhibitions and displays.
The proposed solution involved the quality of the high-definition images, the innovative nature of the three-dimensional scans, and the choice of a digital interface consisting of the animated coin itself, simple to use for the visitor who, with the touch of his or her fingers, is able to study the coin in ten times its original size.
The introduction of scanning and three-dimensional modelling in numismatics has opened up new avenues for education, with the creation of high-definition and even 4K videos that allow visitors to appreciate every detail of the coin.
The set of techniques used for the realisation of multimedia technology applied to numismatic artefacts has also enabled adaptation to portable formats intended for the web and mobile devices.
