When the Renaissance murals at the Brömserhof Museum in Ruedesheim, Germany, were in need of restoration, an unlikely solution was presented: using projection to fill in the gaps. The 13th-century building features murals in its ancestral hall and chapel by artist Hans Ritter, a student of Lucas Cranach the Elder. Parts of the biblical and genealogical motif murals were damaged during WWII, but the artist Mogens Francesco Hendrik Ballin created a precise water-color painting of the mural 19th century.
Since 2007, Professor Nicole Riedl from the University of Applied Sciences and Art in Hildesheim (HAWK) has worked with students and alumni from the Cologne University for Applied Sciences to conserve and restore the murals, but a major reconstruction was not part of the plan. The water-color work inspired Michaela Janke, a student at Cologne University, to come up the idea of using projection to “repair” the damaged areas. She enlisted coolux GmbH and Burmester Event- und Medientechnik, and using the watercolor, she created a digital picture file that could be projected onto the very uneven and contorted surface, using coolux Pandoras Box Player Software. The Pandoras Box Warper projected a grid pattern onto the target area that was recognized by the software and allowed for the picture to be manipulated. Patrick Verhey, a coolux project manager, took less one hour to adjust the digital picture to fit the shape of the damaged area of the murals.
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