3D Digital Heritage: Exploring Virtual Research Space for Art History, Berlin

This week on Monday and Tuesday (19-20 June 2017) ran the 3D Digital Heritage Exploring Virtual Research Space for Art History conference at Humboldt University.

I was an invited keynote along with Frederic Kaplan of EPFL Lausanne Switzerland, and I’d like again to thank Piotr Kuroczynski of the Herder Institute (previously at Herder Institute, now at Mainz University of Applied Sciences) and Georg Schelbert at Humboldt University Berlin, for inviting me.

View from hotel: Fernsehturm (Television Tower) central Berlin, Germany. Near Alexanderplatz

Speeches:

if you’d like to see Frederic Kaplan’s Time Machine (Venice) project, try this TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/frederic_kaplan_how_i_built_an_information_time_machine In Berlin he gave an updated talk with new visualisations, but the above gives some idea..
Piotr talked about the overall East Prussian Manor houses (Palaces) project, great presentation. For more on the project please see https://www.herder-institut.de/en/research-projects/current-projects/virtual-reconstructions-in-transnational-research-environments-the-web-portal-palaces-and-parks-in-former-east-prussia.html
Oliver Hauck & Martin Scholz explained Cultural Heritage Markup Language: http://chml.foundation/?lang=en and Oliver reminded me that historical reconstructions could mean a digital reconstruction based on historical sources OR a digital reconstruction of a historic object (not necessarily the same thing!)
Another highlight for me was the talk by Mieke Pfarr-Harfst, Darmstadt and Krzysztof Koszewski, Warsaw, which combined historical reconstructions with issues in teaching and the human side of usability
Jan Lutteroth declared we should write publications for the service of models (as part of the latter) rather than develop the latter on the former, and I agree! (He said this far more articulately than I just wrote).
Daniel Dworak (Łódz ́ University of Technology), presented on 3dPNG, a new format for transferring 2D vector data (JSON) to 3D data in PNG, (materials storing vertices, faces, and normals plus UVs and materials for the Web with a great compression rate. See Fast encoding of 3D huge data sets in lossless PNG format
Arthur Sarnitz from Kalingrad presented virtual models I would otherwise never had heard of: see “KOENIGSBERG altstadt 009” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OoQRyd5mkU

The last session for Tuesday was in German but they graciously let me visit the Pergamon museum. Simply breathtaking collection.