Crystal Bridges Museum is in the midst of a transformative renovation, nearly doubling its exhibition space, all while remaining open to the public and maintaining its full schedule of dynamic programs and ambitious exhibitions. The museum's distinctive architecture, featuring curved walls, vaulted ceilings with sweeping wood beams, and unconventional structural elements, presents unique design challenges that traditional tools can't easily solve. This extraordinary project calls for innovative thinking and cutting-edge technology. By combining Matterport’s space scanning capabilities with the Voyager platform, the team can efficiently transition from simple artwork checklists to creating highly accurate 3D digital twins of the museum’s galleries, streamlining planning and execution without expanding the workforce. 

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Álvaro Amat, the head of exhibition design at Crystal Bridges and The Momentary said:

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"The traditional tools used for this kind of work would've taken us several intermediate steps, starting with the tedious creation of 2D diagrams and CAD layouts. Then, we would dedicate long hours to modelling spaces, components, and assets in 3D lacking in accuracy. This process would end with the labor intensive creation of deliverables and presentations for the several rounds of review and revision, and at the end, the process of creating installation documents with the inaccuracies and surprises inherent to this process. 

Now, we work hand in hand with our curators and designers seamlessly, integrated and with total transparency: We upload our curatorial checklists of artworks and images, and Voyager accurately creates any set of 2D and 3Dcomplex art pieces to be placed directly into an accurate and realistic virtual model of our galleries. The more intense 3D work is frontloaded saving us many intermediate steps. Then, in real-time collaborative work sessions with our curatorial team, we revise these layouts directly in the virtual gallery, as many times as needed speeding up the review process. Voyager creates reports that include floor plans, elevations, (with or without dimensions) and virtual3D tours that can be shared and reviewed almost immediately by anyone and from anywhere. 

I see Voyager as a partner in the development of an almost magic tool that helps us create a digital twin of our museum, for our teams to experience the exhibitions as we imagine them from the get-go. The Voyager team has guided and assisted us at every step of the process in a relationship that feels like a collaboration more than "tech support." Their hard work creating such a complex model for this very unusual and complicated museum has been amazing. 

Our teams are used to seeing 3D renderings only at the end of a very long process, and only after multiple rounds of review and revision. This made the exhibition design process opaque, inaccessible, and prone to surprises: From the inaccuracy of drawings to the difficulty of imagining how things would look like, realization of errors always happened too late in the process. 

Collaboration has a new meaning. Voyager has allowed our teams to visualize from the start what our curators and designers are imagining together. Then, after everything seems to be in place, the software magically assists in the creation of the installation documents needed with unprecedented speed and accuracy. Not only are we meeting those very ambitious and apparently impossible deadlines, but we are surpassing all expectations with everyone onboard, seeing what we see, and making everyone a true collaborator.”

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