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The Compass Lounge
Take time to explore our vast collection and enjoy free wifi in the comfort of the Compass Lounge. Using new technology in a way that is intuitive and easy to understand, the Compass Lounge and Compass Card open up the Museum’s objects and archives and demonstrate the connections between diverse histories and people.
Location: National Maritime Museum ground floor
Open daily, 10.00–17.00 (last admission 16.30). Admission free.
Littoral: co-curated display
Littoral establishes connections between photographic and film material from the Museum's collections. It reflects upon the subject matter, locations and visual aesthetic of photographer Ansel Adams.
Developed by Amy Watson as part of a curatorial residency, Littoral explores ideas of the shoreline as the threshold between sea and land. It is a site of unrest, an indeterminate border in continual flux. The exhibition invokes this ambiguity to explore the very limits of looking itself.
Littoral is part of a programme of co-curated exhibitions in the Compass Lounge, offering different perspectives on the Museum's collections.
The Compass Card
The Compass Card reveals the hidden connections between people and the objects in the collection.
Every visitor is given their own Compass Card – the size of a credit card – with a unique barcode. As you move throughout the museum you can collect objects that interest you by inserting the card into dedicated units placed in the galleries. Follow up in the Compass Lounge or at home to reveal hidden stories and archival material: rmg.co.uk/compass.
If you register your card you will be sent a free ebook reflecting the objects collected on your visit.
Horizon screen
Over 4000 images from five collections are displayed within this horizon, grouped by visual similarity. This aesthetic arrangement began by using ‘computer vision’ software from the University of Dundee to extract and compare colour and texture information.
This view transcends Museum classifications, allowing thousands of objects to be seen without imposed interpretation. Representing collections in this way exposes patterns: for example, ordering ship models by texture exposes technological development, seen in the clusters of sails, oars and masts. Looking through the layers of flags, it becomes clear that their restricted colour palette was honed to improve visibility at sea.
The plan chest
The plan chest is a physical embodiment of the Museum’s Collections website. Wooden drawers are pulled out to reveal large digital touchscreens – each showing some of the most popular objects on Collections Online. By changing to reflect online activity – how many times objects have been viewed, shared, added to a personal collection or tagged – the plan chest showcases the collection in use.
Smaller screens display individual curator’s top picks from the museum, acting as mini galleries that can respond to specific events or exhibitions. Visitors can create their own galleries at rmg.co.uk/collections.