Google Maps software engineer and Rice University alum Travis McPhail assembled a team at Google to help build an interactive exhibit for visitors at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
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| Photo by Kyle Johnson |
Software engineer Travis McPhail ’04 helps create better mapping technologies for Google. But recently, these skills have taken him down a very different path — helping visitors explore the past at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened to acclaim Sept. 24, 2016, houses thousands of rare and valuable artifacts, ranging from Harriet Tubman’s hymnal to a trainer plane used by the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II — each one telling a story of key moments in African-American history. But when Rice alumnus Travis McPhail ’04 visited the museum in the days before its official opening, one pop culture touchstone caught his eye.
“The very first time I went in there, they were putting up
the ‘Mothership.’ I was like, ‘Is this the infamous Mothership that was
onstage in the 1970s for all these lovely concerts?’” he said,
referring to a larger-than-life prop that was a regular feature at
George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic concerts. Indeed it was. “It’s
smaller in person than I thought,” McPhail recalled.
As a Google software engineer who works
on improving digital mapping technologies, McPhail had never been
involved in museums, their artifacts or the museum experience — except
as a visitor. So when Lonnie Bunch, director of the museum, visited the
tech giant’s Mountain View, Calif., campus in late 2014 to talk about
his vision for the new museum, McPhail was intrigued. Bunch reviewed the
100-year quest to establish the museum, which dates back to 1915 when
African-American Civil War vets called for construction of an
African-American history museum. Then he asked
the invited audience — members of the Black Googler Network, a diversity
resource group at Google — to help. “He asked us to reimagine what a
museum would be like in the modern age,” McPhail recalled.
“There are not many opportunities in life where you
actually get to play a part in a major point in history,” he said. “The
museum was telling the story of my family and people whom I know. I felt
a duty to do this.”
Project Griot
McPhail gathered a dream team of user experience
specialists, software engineers and other members of the Black Googler
Network. The volunteers approached the challenge of adding cutting-edge
technology to the museum systematically, targeting the “pain points”
that needed solving first. They gave their project an informal name —
Project Griot, after a traditional West African word for historian and
storyteller.
The first problem the Googlers noted was
one of space, he said. Although the museum is large enough to display
such blockbuster artifacts as a 77-ton Jim Crow-era railroad car, a
21-foot-tall tower from the notorious Angola Prison and the iconic stage
prop, its collections comprise many more historic artifacts than can be
displayed at any one time. In fact, the five-story, 350,000-square-foot
building only has enough room to display about 3,500 items from its
overall collection of more than 40,000 artifacts.
Though 350,000 square feet may sound spacious, that’s not much room for
40,000 objects, noted W. James Burns, chairman of the American Museum
Alliance’s Curators Committee. Burns estimated that most museums are
lucky to display more than 3 percent of their overall collection at any
given time and often rotate items in and out of storage. “It’s just a
matter of dollars and cents,” Burns said.
McPhail and his team attacked another big
challenge in museum exhibition displays — the difficulty of creating an
exhibit that wouldn’t quickly become obsolete or dated. “Typically when
[display companies] work with [museums], companies provide some sort of
technical solution,” McPhail said. “They agree on what that solution is
and the tech is frozen from that point on. The content of that
interactive exhibit doesn’t change unless there’s a contract for the
company to come back later on.” McPhail not only wanted the group to
find a tech-oriented solution to both issues, he also wanted to help the
museum tell more stories and cover more of the history that is
“critical to the founding of the nation.”
He started by looking for existing
technology to repurpose. “Hey, we’re Google,” McPhail told himself, “we
should be able to help the museum share more of the artifacts they have
in their collection and tell the stories in a more meaningful and
interesting way.” The team considered and rejected the use of 2-D smart
glass and having a display where smartphone users could manipulate the
artifacts. Next, they looked at scanning. The museum was already
scanning in 3-D, but using much slower equipment. Artifacts that would
take the museum up to several hours to scan could easily be done in
about eight minutes on Google’s equipment.
McPhail’s team opted to create a 3-D interactive
experience that would attach meaning to artifacts by telling the stories
behind each one. The visitor sees a touch kiosk with a 3-by-3 grid of
screens that allows them to explore each stored object by zooming in or
out and rotating them to interesting spots on the artifacts. The exhibit
also uses those items as jumping-off points to take visitors on
journeys that help them understand how each piece represents an
intersection between African-American history and U.S. history as a
whole, McPhail said.
Katy Kendrick, exhibitions curator, chose smaller objects that would
scan well and represent a cross section of the museum’s rich
collections. “The use of 3-D technology is relatively new, and to have
it applied in a museum setting is new for us here,” she said of the
collaboration.
One example of what’s on display is a small tin labeled Madam C.J.
Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower — one of many offerings in a line of
early 20th-century beauty products for African-American men and women.
Viewers will not only be able to rotate the object to view it from all
sides, they’ll also be able to read about Sarah Breedlove [C.J. Walker],
who pioneered a successful manufacturing business and became a
millionaire.
Another scanned object to explore is a hat designed by beloved
milliner, Vanilla Beane. “She’s still going strong,” Kendrick said of
the 98-year-old hatmaker. “We have several of her hats in the
collection.” Also in the interactive, visitors can examine a pair of
boots from the groundbreaking Broadway musical, “The Wiz,” and a
sculpture titled “Head of a Negro Woman” (1946) by artist Elizabeth
Catlett. “The detail and texture you can see in these renderings are
amazing,” Kendrick said.
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