King Edward Mine Museum (KEMM) is situated in Troon, south of Camborne, and was a former mine where practical mining education was undertaken by Camborne School of Mines (CSM) up until the 1980s.
How the DDC connection occurred
Since then, CSM has maintained its relationship with KEMM and, consequently, Deep Digital Cornwall were happy to assist KEMM with a digital project and a business assist. This digital project was organised through Dr Carol Richards, who works for the CSM Association and KEMM.
Nature of intervention
KEMM is renowned for having historic tin ore processing machinery in working order to demonstrate to visitors, as well as static exhibits and displays of local geology, social history and local mining engineering manufacturing. However, it cannot physically take visitors underground, so a significant element of the tin mining process had been missing. The DDC project created an immersive virtual reality (VR) underground experience into the KEMM tour, which has been developed through a collaboration with another EU-funded project Immersive Business, led by Falmouth University. The VR headset experience at KEMM has been created from 360-degree film content taken underground at Great Condurrow Mine. In this way, the museum has created a new product and offers a new experience to visitors in its tour that will increase visitor numbers.
Value of any grant support
The digital project was developed and funded through a DDC Innovation Voucher with total value £4,660.
What the business assist/grant has achieved
The use of immersive technology has been complemented with videos on other televisual displays showing flythroughs of King Edward and Grenville United mines. This work has resulted in a further collaboration between KEMM and DDC through a business assist with these videos being developed by DDC. This involves taking high quality digital photographs of the KEMM collection of mine plans, surface plans, longitudinal sections and other mining related documents from the KEMM collection. Once done, these digital photographs are used to generate 3D mine models, which include the amount of stopeing within each lode in each mine, and a projection of each model in the Deep Digital Cornwall 3D Visualisation Suite. These 3D mine models also contribute directly to the Deep Digital Cornwall Modelling Mines and Geology Work Package.
Plans for the future, incl. data on DDC Data Hub
Deep Digital Cornwall has produced an archival spreadsheet as well as a digital library of KEMM’s content, which KEMM can make more readily available for Cornish businesses and interested parties. This archive is vital for KEMM to have as part of their charitable status. All this photography, archiving and digitisation work is available as well on the DDC Data Hub. However, the work done to create this archive would not have been possible without the assistance received from KEMM and the amazing efforts of the mine modelling team within DDC.
