Category Archives: Presentation

CAA 2017 Other session “Mechanics, Mods and Mashups” ACCEPTED!

Announcements, archaeology, digital heritage, heritage, Presentation, Symposium, virtual heritage, visualisation, , ,

My proposal to the 2017 Computer Applications and Quantitive Methods in Archaeology (CAA) international conference, March 14th and 16th, 2017 at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA) has been accepted.The below will be updated when I speak to the co-organisers but we are thinking of a morning presentation and (possible) game pitch, and an aftertoon work on key ideas..

CAA2017 Atlanta: Other Session

Mechanics, Mods and Mashups: Games of the Past for the Future Designed by Archaeologists
Organizers: Erik Champion, Michael Nitsche, Natalie Underberg-Goode

Are you a fan of Assassin’s Creed but upset over how it could have made history exciting without having to employ and manipulate central historical characters? Love Lara Croft: Tomb Raider if only the tomb-raiding (stealing) mechanics could be replaced by something more meaningful? Wish that the Total War Series allowed you to employ agent modeling to test competing archaeological theories of migration, colonization and invasion or just to improve its historical accuracy? Dream you could use the language, graphic vision and immersion of Far Cry Primal in the classroom to explain (through engaging interaction) the Mesolithic rather than primarily use it as a backstage to fight semi- believable creatures? Then this workshop is for you. Correction. This workshop is BY you.

Archaeologists and people of a historical persuasion:

  • Either take a game with an inspiring concept, technique or mechanic..
  • OR extrapolate a current or past game to a game or simulation of the future
  • OR they share their vision of a game or simulation that reveals, expresses or augments their own research.At the workshop the writers will either:
  • Bring their own designs, video cut-scenes, and illustrations and media depicting what this new vision would look like
  • OR have some form of play-testing demonstration, cards, or illustrations or physical play-throughs (preferably involving the CAA workshop audience) revealing how this new level, mod or gameplay episode COULD be experienced or how it could be revealed.The writers will:
    Ask the audience to play through or role-play the actions that would be in the creative piece.

    The audience will:
    Give the writers feedback ideas and nominate the best presentation in terms of fun and engagement, imaginative ideas, and archaeological relevance (in promoting archaeology, teaching archaeology or extending archaeological scholarship).

    Potential tools:
    Gameplay cards, game prototyping tools, scenes or videos from a 3D editor or game editor (Unity, Unreal, Blender), board games as prototypes, playing cards, physical artifacts that are role-played by the presenter, illustrations, slideshows, game editors (like the SIMS: https://www.thesims.com/en_GB) used to make films (Machinima), roleplaying videos, flowcharts, interactive fiction (like https://twinery.org/). We will provide a fuller list of tools and examples to potential attendees before the workshop.

    Equipment:
    PC with sound and display, some floor space to move around in for physical re-enactments. Tables or some form of desk to provide written or graphical feedback.

    Length:
    Participants: 26 maximum (ideally) where 6 present. We require half an hour a presenter so three hours for 6 presenters, 6 hours a whole day if we want to go to 12 presenters.
    Ideally the non-presenting audience is not too large, preferably up to 20.

    Outcome:
    We will approach a creative publisher (Liquid Books, University of Michigan Press or other) to provide an online or printable output of the demonstrations and the audience feedback.
    We would also like to invite presenters – if they can make it – to a workshop at DIGRA2017 Melbourne Australia to test out their demonstrations and play-throughs to game academics.

    References
    Champion, E. (2012) Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism. Entertainment Technology Centre Press.

#GLAMVR16

Academic, augmented reality, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, heritage, HIVE, Presentation, respositories, Symposium, talks, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation,

Well #GLAMVR16 was the twitter hashtag for Friday 26 August’s event held at the HIVE Curtin university, Perth. In the morning two invited speakers (Assistant Professor Elaine Sullivan and Mr Conal Tuohy) gave talks on Digital Karnak and Linked Open Data. They were followed by myself and my colleagues at the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, then a workshop on Trove data feed into UNITY game engine dynamically (Mr Michael Wiebrands) and Augmented Reality, Vueforia>Unity (Mr Dominic Manley).

There were three themes/reasons for the morning talks and afternoon workshops.

1.Digital Heritage: Workflows & issues in preserving, exporting & linking digital collections (especially heritage collections for GLAM.

2.Scholarly Making: Encourage makerspaces & other activities in tandem with academic research.

3.Experiential Media: Develop AR/VR & other new media technology & projects esp. for humanities.

The event was part of a strategic grant received from the School of Media Culture and Creative Arts, so thanks very much to MCCA!

Schedule and links to slides

Session title and links to slidesharePRESENTER
IntroductionsEar Zow Digital
Digital KarnakElaine Sullivan, UCSC USA
Linked Open Data VisualisationConal Tuohy, Brisbane
MORNING TEAmorning TEA
Making collections accessible in an online environmentLise Summers
Digital scholarship, makerspaces and the libraryKaren Miller
Digital Heritage Interfaces and Experiential MediaEar Zow Digital
Simple Biometric Devices for Audience EngagementStuart Bender
Usability of interactive digital multimedia in the GLAM sectorBeata Dawson
Emotive Media – Visualisation and Analysis of Human Bio-Feedback DataArtur Lugmayr
Visualising information with RAM iSquaresPauline Joseph
LUNCH
digital workflows (UNITY) Michael Wiebrands
Introduction to Augmented RealityDominic Manley
final questions/social networking/ SUNDOWNERCentre for Aboriginal Studies Foyer

Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media

3D and game editors, Announcements, augmented reality, Biofeedback, design, digital heritage, game, heritage, HIVE, Presentation, Symposium, talks, tracking, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, , , , , , , ,

Our internal small grant (School of Media Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University) was successful!

Here is a synopsis of the application (redacted):

Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media

We propose

  • A one-day workshop [Friday 26 August 2016, HIVE] with 3D, Digital APIs, UNITY and Augmented Reality workshops.
  • We will present our projects at that workshop and a month later meet to review progress and each other’s publications and grants.
  • Then we will organize with the Library and other GLAM partners a cultural hackathon in Perth where programmers and other parties spend a day creating software prototypes based on our ideas from the workshop. The best project will win a prize but the IP will be open source and contestants may be invited into the research projects or related grant applications.
  • Equipment to build prototypes and showcases for future grants. Part of the money will also go into Virtual Reality headsets, and Augmented Reality equipment that can be loaned out from the MCCA store to postgraduates and students.

The above would help progress the below research projects:

  • Another need is to develop the maker-space and digital literacy skills in information studies and the Library Makerspace, to develop a research area in scholarly making.
  • Another project is to integrate archives and records with real-time visualisation such as in the area of digital humanities scholarship, software training in digital humanities, and hands on workshops and crafting projects at the Curtin University Library.
  • Another project is to explore how SCALAR can integrate 3D and Augmented Reality and create a framework for cloud-based media assets that could dynamically relate to an online scholarly publication and whether that journal in printed form, with augmented reality trackers and head mounted displays could create multimedia scholarly journals where the multimedia is dynamically downloaded from the Internet so can be continually updated. Can this work inform future developments of eSPACE and interest in ‘scholarly making’ and makerspaces?
  • There is potential to create an experiential media research cluster with the new staff of SODA, to explore immersive and interactive media that can capture emotions and affects of participants or players. This requires suitable equipment.

3D popups and scholarly books

archaeology, augmented reality, digital heritage, Presentation, publication, visualisation

Scholarly publishers want to produce quality longterm-durable books. I get that. But some of us young digital guerilla turks want to combine 3D and augmented technologies so 3D models can be shared and experimented (played) with.
And 3D models should be able to change over time, to link to different scholarly resources and models and links and linked resources should be able to be maintained and modified.

So how do we have stable print materials and changing, dynamic 3D models?

Easy peasy.
Consider the magic book. You put on these special see through glasses. Open a book. The camera recognises the augmented reality tracker (marker) on an open page and on your see-through glasses is projected a virtual 3D object. It can move, it can have animations. But typically the AR 3D object relates to a point on the page. Now I believe the original marker and related augmented 3D shape was stored on the magic book glasses/goggles.
But this won’t do for scholarly preservation.
Say you open a book, You hold your camera phone over a mark (tag, tracker) on the page of the book. On your phone lens appears a 3D playable object. But the phone does not natively hold the 3D virtual object.
Instead, the tracker/marker on the book induces the phone to search through an online library and retrieve the current 3D virtual object that links to that augmented reality tracker.marker/barcode on the book.
And downloads the most recent virtual model.
Why is this useful? The scholarly publisher only has to produce a normal book but with augmented reality markers (as an image).
The library or academic organisation supplies the links (perhaps the 3D virtual object has its own URI). The phone retrieves the most recent 3D AR object from a database (online) maintained by a library or scholarly community.
And as you open/read the book, augmented reality models dance/float/appear on your book (or iPad or Android tablet).
Perhaps the way you move the tablet/eReader changes the appearance or animation of the AR object (for example: lift it up and the model changes forwards in time,lower the tablet and earlier versions of the model appear)..
And theoretically the book will still be useful even 10 years from now if someone maintains the digital assets available at the URI that the book markers point to.

Still don’t understand? Perhaps I need a diagram!

NB below photos are not mine but from http://masters.donntu.org/2012/iii/akchurin/library/article9.htm in “Collaborative Augmented Reality” written by Mark Billinghurst, Hirokazu Kato, Communications of the ACM – How the virtual inspires the real, Volume 45 Issue 7, ACM New York, NY, USA – July 2002, p. 64–70.

abstract for 2016 East-West Philosophers’ Conference, Hawaii

Presentation, virtual heritage, visualisation, ,

Conference website: http://hawaii.edu/phil/2016-east-west-philosophers-conference-update/

Paper Title: Philosophical Issues of Place and the Past in Virtual Reality

There are indisputably many good reasons for finding and restoring heritage sites and artefacts with the most impartial and accurate scientific methods and technological advances. Yet the ICOMOS Burra Charter defines cultural significance in terms of the value of a place as it helps people understand the past, as it enriches the present, and educates future generations, these values can be aesthetic, historic, social or spiritual, (and thus not just scientific). Therefore it does not necessarily follow that the best user-experience for members of the public is purely based on a rigorous scientific perspective, because such a perspective does not fully explain the cultural significance of a place as experienced by the originators of the locally situated culture.

On the other hand, evoking cultural significance may be helped by a philosophical consideration of how specific human experiences can be understood and conveyed. The Dictionary of Philosophy says (on p.464) phenomenology “is the attempt to describe our experience directly, as it is, separately from its origins and development, independently of the causal explanations that historians, sociologists or psychologists might give”. While hermeneutics, it says (on p.274-5), “explores the kind of existence had by beings who are able to understand meanings, and to whom the world is primarily an object of understanding (rather than, say, of sense-perceptions)”.

I wish to investigate whether an approach that would best utilise multimedia and the differing multimodal ways in which we learn and experience the outside world would be phenomenological and hermeneutical. In other words it would attempt to understand how the way individual societies experience the world, how they interpret the world to themselves and to each other, how their cultural signs are made, modified, and learnt. It would also attempt to discover how the horizons of current visitors could be nudged out of balance by being either overwhelmed by encounters with genuine alterity (that is, sense of otherness), or by gradually learning how to be accepted in this totally different phenomenological world.

A further pressing issue in the design of virtual places and especially in the design of virtual heritage environments is to avoid the ‘museumization’ and ‘Western’ viewpoint as forewarned by Ziauddin Sardar and others. Can this technology help provide an appropriate sense of alterity and an appropriate situated sense of place?

References

ICOMOS, (1999).‘The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS charter for the conservation of places of cultural significance’, http://www.icomos.org/australia/burracharter.html.

Mautner, T. (2005). Dictionary of Philosophy (Penguin Reference, 2nd edition, Suffolk United Kingdom: Penguin, Books, p. 464 and p.275.

Sardar, Z. (1996). alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West. In Cyberfutures: culture and politics on the information superhighway, ed. Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome Ravetz, 14-41. London: Pluto Press.

Video mashup tools for online multimedia archives

Conference, Presentation, respositories, ,

Just collating some tools for the above purpose, I hope to help an academic here create an online authoring/mashup tool of pre-rendered videos, audio-video interviews and images so that an audience particularly children can create their own narratives and presentations using the online multimedia archive (yet to be uploaded).

Leading contender

Looks interesting

Other

Other video remixers

http://mashable.com/2006/03/07/eyespot-all-hail-the-video-mashups/#rwZQ_lZ8Umq8

Seeing Is Revealing: A Critical Discussion on Visualisation And The Digital Humanities

3D and game editors, Academic, Digital Humanities, Presentation, virtual heritage,

My talk for tomorrow’s dh2015.org conference at UWS, Sydney is entitled:
Seeing Is Revealing: A Critical Discussion on Visualisation And The Digital Humanities.
The presentation examines how

  1. More emphasis has been on scientific visualisation, on non-interactive calculation and presentation of quantifiable data but Digital Humanities Visualisation is not only about data, but can also be interactive. vague, questioning and rhetorical.
  2. Visualisation is not only pretty, (refer Baldwin, S. 2013. The Idiocy of the Digital Literary (and what does it have to do with digital humanities)? digital humanities quarterly (dhq) [Online], 7. Available: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000155/000155.html [Accessed 14 March 2014]). It can help solve and not just communicate research problems.
  3. Visualisation has to overcome ocularcentrism as Virtual Reality reflects not only sighted reality but non-sighted reality, visualisation is more than just the visual (explain using cave paintings!)
  4. Game design is not typically part of Digital Humanities but it is an interesting vehicle for community feedback, cultural issues, critical reflection and medium-specific techniques (such as procedural rhetoric-see last post).
  5. I will discuss visualisation in terms of game engines for history and heritage, hybrid pano-tables, learning via inventories and maps, NPC driven narrative, indirect personalisation (biofeedback), and active speaker as embedded and embodied characters inside environments.
  6. There are huge issues, HCI, authenticity, developing scholarly arguments in collaboration, preservation, etc.)
  7. So if the above is not Digital Humanities what is it? It employs research in the traditional humanities, converts IT people to humanities research (sometimes), helps preserves and communicates cultural heritage and cultural significance through alterity, cultural constraints and counterfactual imaginings. History and heritage is not always literature! And the DH audience is not always literature-focused or interested in traditional forms of literacy.