Responses by Mike Daly, head of Creative Studio, State Library Victoria.

Background: The Melbourne-based State Library Victoria has more than five million items in its collection. The most popular item isn’t a book but the armor of Ned Kelly, Australia’s most notorious bushranger. The artifact is on permanent display in the library in a protective case, along with other items related to Kelly, including his rifle and ripped boot.

The exhibit is loved by visitors, but audiences tell us that they want to go beyond the glass, get up close and look inside the objects. We wanted to make this happen in an engaging, accessible and innovative way.We considered every medium, including touchscreens, immersive projection and VR/AR, but we chose the web because it’s so accessible and available to a global audience.

Design core: Mouthful of Dust is a cinematic web experience that brings diverse new perspectives on Ned Kelly. High-resolution 3-D scans, made from thousands of still photographs, offer near-forensic detail of Kelly’s armor; boot; rifle; death mask; and the Jerilderie Letter, a manifesto he wrote in which he attempts to justify his actions.

The digital objects are paired with commissioned pieces by five remarkable Australian writers, voiced by the writers themselves as narration. Unlike the didactic descriptions you might see on labels, these reflections offer alternative, imaginative interpretations of the myth of Ned Kelly and the ideas that surround him.

Accessibility: We built accessibility in from the start and then kept iterating to make improvements. The current release includes screen-reader optimization, multiple navigation control methods, audio description and subtitle tracks, reduced motion settings, and a high-contrast UI mode, among other features.

Although the site employs complex 3-D technologies, like WebGL and Gaussian splatting, it conforms to WCAG 2.2 Level AA accessibility guidelines—thanks in no small part to advice from Centre for Accessibility Australia, with which we collaborated throughout the project. We were thrilled that the site was a finalist in the 2025 Australian Access Awards, among many other honors for design.

Process: Mouthful of Dust was designed and developed at State Library Victoria by Creative Studio, the in-house team of designers, developers and filmmakers. We worked shoulder-to-shoulder with experts inside and outside the library who focus on curation, preservation, conservation, digitization and spatial technologies.

During a scheduled gallery changeover, we were given a rare opportunity to scan Ned Kelly’s armor when it could safely leave its case. Conservators and scanning teams had only days in a controlled studio to capture thousands of images in unprecedented detail.

Navigation structure: The website employs some conventional website design language, but we think of it as a hybrid: part exhibition, part film and part game. One technical challenge was developing a way for users to navigate 3-D objects up close without needing a three-button mouse or gamepad. Creative Studio’s lead developer Nick Paustian built a complex but intuitive click-and-drag (or touch-and-drag) system that lets you glide along the surface of objects without intersecting with them.

Technology: The experience is real-time rendered, fully responsive and built on standard web technologies. There’s nothing to install, and it scales from phones to desktops. Featuring a page weight of only 80 to 200 MB, the website is far lighter than a YouTube video of equivalent length.

Generated using photogrammetry and LiDAR, the 3-D objects are represented with a mix of traditional solid geometry and newer Gaussian splatting techniques. We worked with Electric Lens Company and Splice Boys to scan the 3-D assets. The original object scans are extremely high-res, with more than 100 million polygons per asset, and they have been downsized to multiple levels of detail for use in the web experience.