Bibliotheca Alexandrina launches 'Wall of Knowledge' exhibition

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt - 28 June 2018: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, in cooperation with the Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT), launched on Wednesday the "Wall of Knowledge" exhibition, featuring The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani.

Through the "Wall of Knowledge" project, the BA developed an Augmented Reality (AR) mobile application in order to increase public engagement with Egyptian art and heritage displayed at museums using smartphones and tablets.

This project depends on distributing pre-designed posters, strategically located inside museums, which include basic information about a specific art piece or heritage topic.

Using the app, users are able to extend this information by superimposing virtual text, images and 3D objects over the poster. The Wall of Knowledge experience is currently available at the Egyptian Museum (EM), the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo (NMEC), and recently at the BA Antiquities Museum, in Alexandria. More museums are currently under development.

Regarding the Book of the Dead experience, the latest Wall of Knowledge experiences are developed to tell one of the most interesting stories of Ancient Egyptian civilization, The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani, which has cursive hieroglyphs and color illustrations that date back to around 1250 BCE, in the XIX Dynasty of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt.

It is displayed at the British Museum. Using the Wall of Knowledge app, users can interact with Ani’s Book of the Dead in different three languages Arabic, English and French.