Deutsches Museum

Joseph Von Fraunhofer (1787-1826) is a physicist to whom is accredited the discovery of what is called nowadays the "Frauhofer lines", those black stripes which appear while observing the sun light spectrum. To study this phenomenon, he invented a spectrometer, whose original copy is the property of the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

During a post doctoral fellowship of 9 month at the Fraunhofer IAIS Institute in Bonn, I participated to a collaboration project with this museum. The goal was to propose to visitors a pedagogical exhibition allowing them to reproduce the experiment conducted by Fraunhofer at that time. Thanks to a multimedia terminal that we have developed, the visitor can then manipulate a virtual version of the spectrometer, beside which the original is presented, and thus study the phenomenon while benefiting from textual information about what is currently observed. Our first motivation was to offer to the visitor, through the use of new technologies, a better understanding of this experiment and this phenomenon thanks to a direct involvement into an interactive and educative application.

This exhibition has been launched officially at the Deutsches Museum the 19th November 2009 during the inauguration of the New Technology Center, to which it is now an integral part.