Tag Archives: virtual heritage

Virtual Heritage Book Proposal Reviewers

If you’d like to be suggested as a reviewer for an edited book proposal we will send to a publisher on virtual heritage (a concise guide) please let me know and I will tell the editor (I won’t know who the final chosen reviewers will be and I’d rather not re-bother the usual suspects) … with the authors, we are deciding whether to write a very concise 30,000 words or a normal 80,000-word book proposal (but the latter would be more expensive for university students, the primary audience).

new article: A Comparison of Immersive Realities and Interaction Methods: Cultural Learning in Virtual Heritage

A Comparison of Immersive Realities and Interaction Methods: Cultural Learning in Virtual Heritage

by Mafkereseb Kassahun Bekele and Ear Zow Digital

Open access article in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 24 September 2019 | https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2019.00091

In recent years, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Virtuality (AV), and Mixed Reality (MxR) have become popular immersive reality technologies for cultural knowledge dissemination in Virtual Heritage (VH). These technologies have been utilized for enriching museums with a personalized visiting experience and digital content tailored to the historical and cultural context of the museums and heritage sites. Various interaction methods, such as sensor-based, device-based, tangible, collaborative, multimodal, and hybrid interaction methods, have also been employed by these immersive reality technologies to enable interaction with the virtual environments. However, the utilization of these technologies and interaction methods isn’t often supported by a guideline that can assist Cultural Heritage Professionals (CHP) to predetermine their relevance to attain the intended objectives of the VH applications. In this regard, our paper attempts to compare the existing immersive reality technologies and interaction methods against their potential to enhance cultural learning in VH applications. To objectify the comparison, three factors have been borrowed from existing scholarly arguments in the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain. These factors are the technology’s or the interaction method’s potential and/or demonstrated capability to: (1) establish a contextual relationship between users, virtual content, and cultural context, (2) allow collaboration between users, and (3) enable engagement with the cultural context in the virtual environments and the virtual environment itself. Following the comparison, we have also proposed a specific integration of collaborative and multimodal interaction methods into a Mixed Reality (MxR) scenario that can be applied to VH applications that aim at enhancing cultural learning in situ.

major grant: Photogrammetry heritage and interaction design

Announced today-Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage 2018 Grant LP180100284 awarded $461,783.00

https://www.arc.gov.au/news-publications/media/research-highlights/developing-immersive-3d-experiences-explore-undersea-heritage-sites

Investigators:
Dr Andrew Woods; Professor Erik Champion; Dr Petra Helmholz; Dr David Belton; Professor Derek Lichti; Ms Catherine Belcher; Dr Ross Anderson; Mr Ian Thilthorpe; Mr Danny Murphy; Adjunct Professor Alec Coles; Dr James Hunter; Mr Michael Harvey.

Photogrammetric Reconstruction for Underwater Virtual Heritage Experiences. This project aims to enable significant underwater cultural heritage sites such as shipwrecks to be recreated in immersive underwater virtual heritage experiences. Photogrammetric 3D reconstruction techniques will be used to generate complex digital 3D models of shipwreck sites from hundreds of thousands of underwater images. This will allow vivid experiences to be created which explain the stories of these wrecks. The project will conduct audience engagement studies to recommend the most appropriate methods to implement underwater virtual heritage experiences for Australian audiences. The sites which will be used as test datasets are some of the most significant Australian shipwreck sites, including HMAS Sydney (II) and HMAS AE1.

Institutes:Curtin University, WESTERN AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, and University of Calgary.

3D Digital Heritage Models as Sustainable Scholarly Resources

Dr Hafizur Rahaman and I just had an open access article published (online)  “3D Digital Heritage Models as Sustainable Scholarly Resources” in MDPI Sustainability in a Special Issue.

Abstract

If virtual heritage is the application of virtual reality to cultural heritage, then one might assume that virtual heritage (and 3D digital heritage in general) successfully communicates the need to preserve the cultural significance of physical artefacts and intangible heritage. However, digital heritage models are seldom seen outside of conference presentations, one-off museum exhibitions, or digital reconstructions used in films and television programs. To understand why, we surveyed 1483 digital heritage papers published in 14 recent proceedings. Only 264 explicitly mentioned 3D models and related assets; 19 contained links, but none of these links worked. This is clearly not sustainable, neither for scholarly activity nor as a way to engage the public in heritage preservation. To encourage more sustainable research practices, 3D models must be actively promoted as scholarly resources. In this paper, we also recommend ways researchers could better sustain these 3D models and assets both as digital cultural artefacts and as tools to help the public explore the vital but often overlooked relationship between built heritage and the natural world.

Game prototyping workshop in Turin

At the Politecnico di Torino, Turin Italy, I gave a talk on Monday in their summer school on Cities Cultural heritage and Digital Humanities, on Virtual heritage and publication issues.

Yesterday I ran a workshop on game prototyping especially for history and heritage games.

The slides from the workshop are here

I am particularly interested in developing the conceptual framework for teaching this, on slides 3-4 (with a better diagram!)

Cybermaps in 3D heritage

A journal asked that I respond to a paper that briefly mentions the above. Notes to self include these general questions that I seldom find answers to in virtual heritage papers and not mentioned in my response (the journal has a strict word limit):

  1. Interpretation: It is very hard to extrapolate from VH papers how various interpretations are fostered.
  2. Beginnings: Where do you place a visitor in a virtual site?
  3. Dynamic alterity: How should or could they navigate time, space and interpretation?
  4. Art Versus Scientific Imagination: How should they separate artistic from current reality from interpreted virtuality? What if the artistry is impressive but speculative?
  5. Projects: Where can the projects (that apparently relate to the questions posed in the text), be experienced or otherwise accessed? How will they be preserved?
  6. Interactive Navigation: How do we navigate time, space, interpretation, and task/goal?
  7.  Authenticity, accuracy and artistry: How does one balance all three?

CFP: VSMM2017, Dublin, extended deadline

VSMM2017 – Deadline postponed!
Abstracts and workshop proposals deadline for the 23rd International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM2017), has been postponed from June 2nd to June 15th 2017.
The conference will be held October 30th – November 2nd 2017 in Ireland at University College Dublin, with Special Workshops and Cultural Tours on November 3rd – 5th in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Thur 15 Jun 2017 – Deadline for Abstracts/Workshop Proposals
Fri 28 Jul 2017 – Notification of Acceptance to Authors/Presenters
Fri 1 Sep 2017 – Registration Opens
Mon 15 Sep 2017 – Camera-ready Papers Due
Fri 13 Oct 2017 – Registration Closes
Tue 31 Oct – Thur 2 Nov – VSMM2017 Conference in Dublin
Fri 3 Nov – Sun 5 Nov – VSMM2017 Workshops & Cultural Tours in Belfast

Website: http://vsmm.org/vsmm2017/

Book series in Digital Humanities and Digital Heritage

Digital Heritage/Archaeology

Digital Humanities

See also https://adho.org/publications which lists

Books and Book Series

NB Is UWM also a Digital (book series) publisher? http://dc.uwm.edu/arthist_mobilizingthepast/1/

report on trip to Italy, Malta (abridged)

Erik Champion was awarded a small school grant of $2000 to present conference papers at Genoa Italy in October 2016.

GENOA ITALY
He presented two conference papers which are now in the Eurographics Digital Library.

  1. Champion, Erik Malcolm; Qiang, Li; Lacet, Demetrius; Dekker, Andrew. https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2630933/browse?value=Champion%2C+Erik+Malcolm&type=author3D in-world Telepresence With Camera-Tracked Gestural Interaction (The Eurographics Association, 2016) While many education institutes use Skype, Google Chat or other commercial video-conferencing applications, these applications are not suitable for presenting architectural or urban design or archaeological information ..
  2. Champion, Erik Malcolm, The Missing Scholarship Behind Virtual Heritage Infrastructures (The Eurographics Association, 2016). This theoretical position paper outlines four key issues blocking the development of effective 3D models that would be suitable for the aims and objectives of virtual heritage infrastructures. It suggests that a real-time …

At the presentation in Genoa he was invited to discussion collaboration with the world heritage lab: HIVE, University of California Merced:

VENICE ITALY
He was also invited to present at Ca Foscari Venice (picture above) -apart from being the guest speaker on a digital humanities panel at the academic year opening of Ca Foscari, University of Venice and he was interviewed by their student paper.
VALETTA MALTA
He was also invited to present at the National Centre of Creativity, organised by the University of Malta and the talk was announced in the national paper, Times of Malta. He also met Heritage Malta and another institute who are keen to collaborate in cultural heritage projects.

He’d like to thank MCCA-Curtin, Arianna and Milena for organising his talks in Venice and Malta respectively and Eurographics for the GCH conference in Genoa.

Book Chapter Abstract

Book Chapter For Book On Computational Archaeology, redTDPC, INAM, Mexico

Title: A Schematic Division of Game-Learning Strategies Relevant to Digital Archaeology and Digital Cultural Heritage

Abstract

How can we transmit the values and interpretations of cultural heritage (using virtual reality) which is low-cost, contextually appropriate, educationally effective, and collaborative? While much excellent research has been undertaken on social presence in virtual environments (Swinth, 2002), research on the design and evaluation of cultural presence, the perception another culture is portrayed and experienced in a virtual environment, lags behind. Where cultural presence has been explored, it has not been directed towards the experiencing of culturally significant heritage (Riva et al., 2002), and organizations such as UNESCO have not prescribed how to determine if the user experience achieved the goals of the designers and shareholders. One possible solution for digital archaeology is to deploy commercial games that allow themselves to be modded (as in modified). This chapter will provide a simple classification of the ways in which game-based examples may help communicate digital archaeology and related content, and argue that there are at least four major areas of research that need to be investigated further.

UNESCO Chair-the fun begins

Announced via our internal Curtin University website:

Partnership with UNESCO

Curtin recently signed a contract to establish the University’s first UNESCO Chair of Cultural Heritage and Visualisation for Professor Erik Champion (School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts). The Chair will cooperate closely with UNESCO on programs and activities, and facilitate new projects and collaborations with other UNESCO chairs and scholars, particularly in the field of digital cultural heritage. Two related PhD Scholarships and a Research Fellow position will shortly be advertised and there will be a program to invite visiting fellows from around the world.

At the partnership signing with Professor Alan Dench, Associate Professor Michele Willson and Professor Erik Champion of the Faculty of Humanities.

Increasing the Life & Usage of Virtual Heritage Models

Following on rather nicely from my last blog, the below abstract was accepted yesterday so hopefully will be in Beijing at Tsinghua University 7-10 August (then invited to NUS, Singapore 12-14 August).

Initial abstract for the 4th International Symposium on Cultural Heritage Conservation and Digitization (CHCD 2016), entitled “Re-vive: Heritage Coming Back to Life”.

TITLE: Increasing the Life and Usage of Virtual Heritage Models

KEY WORDS: Virtual heritage, infrastructure, models, mechanics, interaction, preservation, evaluation, simulations, digital scholarly ecosystem.

ABSTRACT:

For many years academics have argued that a major issue in the development of high quality and effective virtual heritage projects has been a corresponding lack of evaluation methods (Economou and Pujol, 2008, Champion, 2006, Tost and Economou, 2009, Karoulis et al., 2006, Tan and Rahaman, 2009). Despite two decades of research and advancing technological sophistication, and the widespread proliferation of virtual heritage conferences, the same problems are still evident.

While the issue of meaningful evaluation is no doubt a serious problem, this paper proposes that a more fundamental issue has been with the design and circulation of the digital models themselves. The problem is at least sixfold. Firstly, digital heritage models are typically frozen products, they do not easily scale, they aren’t typically component-based, they are difficult to add to and otherwise edit. There is a problem of standards (of authenticity, software and hardware standards, operating guidelines, and adherence to charters that dictate best practice in virtual heritage). Digital heritage model formats are not standardised nor created specifically for preservation (let alone separate their archival function from presentation purposes). Digital heritage models are typically models rather than simulations, they are not predicative tools, they don’t create, convey or question hypothetical. The interaction design patterns (and mechanics) are not standardised, and not preserved, let alone separated from the 2D and 3D media assets. Finally, these projects typically do not link to digital scholarly resources (publications, image databases, online maps and so forth).

I propose that virtual heritage community needs to debate and adopt a scholarly ecology, an overall system and community that provide feedback, management and impact for virtual heritage research. This requires political coordination and social organisation beyond the scope of this paper but I will also review some more technical proposals that may help address the above problems.

For theme C: Cultural heritage exhibition and interpretation of digital technology: virtual reality, augmented reality, digital museum

References

CHAMPION, E. M. 2006. Evaluating Cultural Learning in Virtual Environments. PhD, University of Melbourne.

ECONOMOU, M. & PUJOL, L. 2008. Educational tool or expensive toy? Evaluating VR evaluation and its relevance for virtual heritage. New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage, London, Routledge, 242-260.

KAROULIS, A., SYLAIOU, S. & WHITE, M. 2006. Usability evaluation of a virtual museum interface. Informatica, 17, 363-380.

TAN, B.-K. & RAHAMAN, H. 2009. Virtual heritage: Reality and criticism. Tidafi, T. et Dorta, T., éditeurs: Joining Languages, Cultures and Visions: CAAD Futures, 130.

TOST, L. P. & ECONOMOU, M. 2009. Worth a thousand words? The usefulness of immersive virtual reality for learning in cultural heritage settings. International Journal of Architectural Computing, 7, 157-176.

Two new full papers added

I have been given permission to upload these two journal articles to my website. Click the paper title to go to the PDF in question:

Champion, E. (2015). Defining Cultural Agents for Virtual Heritage Environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments-Special Issue on “Immersive and Living Virtual Heritage: Agents and Enhanced Environments,” Summer 2015, Vol. 24, No. 3: pp. 179–186. MIT Press. URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/pres/24/3

Champion, E. (2015). Entertaining The Similarities And Distinctions Between Serious Games and Virtual Heritage Projects. Special Issue in the Journal of Entertainment Computing on the theme of Entertainment in Serious Games. Volume 14, May 2016, Pages 67–74. Elsevier. Online.

 

A Good Publisher For A Virtual Heritage +3D Open Access Journal

If I gathered academic colleagues and other partners to produce an Open Access Virtual Heritage/Digital Place Journal with dynamically linked 3D models viewable online or as downloads for computers or Head Mounted Display formats like WebVR perhaps) who would be a good open access publisher?

Virtual Heritage Article free to download until 21 April 2016

Elsevier have kindly let me and others download the below article from the Journal Entertainment Computing, (Volume 14, May 2016, Pages 67–74) up until 21 April 2016. From 22 April it will be behind the Elsevier paywall again.

http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Se406gYiZRYG4
No sign up or registration is needed – just click and read!

Title: Entertaining The Similarities & Distinctions Between Serious Games & Virtual Heritage Projects

Abstract:
This article summarizes past definitions of entertainment, serious games and virtual heritage in order to discuss whether virtual heritage has particular problems not directly addressed by conventional serious games. For virtual heritage, typical game-style entertainment poses particular ethical problems, especially around the simulation of historic violence and the possible trivialization of culturally sensitive and significant material. While virtual heritage can be considered to share some features of serious games, there are significantly different emphases on objectives. Despite these distinctions, virtual heritage projects could still meet serious games-style objectives while entertaining participants.

Proposed keynote for INAH talk, December 4 Mexico

The Red Tematica de Tecnologías Digitales para la Difusión del Patrimonio Cultural (Research Network on Digital Technologies for the Dissemination of Cultural Heritage) invited me to Mexico City on December 4 for their conference Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Interaction Design), I was asked to talk about the following:

We expect you to deliver a 45 minutes presentation, followed by 15 mins questions. It would be great if you can focus on your concept of interactive history and virtual reality, serious games, etc. The audience is composed by cultural heritage professionals (archaeologists, curators, museum personnel, librarians, etc.).

Does my below abstract sound like it is answering the above? I am not too sure:

Virtual Heritage Projects versus Digital Heritage Infrastructure

In this talk I provide my definition and perspective on Virtual Heritage and an overview of its major problems: obsolete, unreliable or overly expensive technology, a critical lack of evaluation studies, restricted interaction, low-impact pedagogical outcomes and limited community involvement. Despite two decades of research and advancing technological sophistication, the same problems are still evident. This suggests a more serious underlying issue: virtual heritage lacks a scholarly ecology, an overall system and community that provide feedback, management and scalability to virtual heritage research.

For example, in the call for the recent http://www.digitalheritage2015.org/ conference call (“The largest international scientific event on digital heritage”), evaluation is not a central issue, listed under Computer Graphics and Interaction, not under Analysis and Interpretation.  And where is the focus on the user experience or examples of long-term infrastructure with feedback from the community and not just from IT professionals?  Neither archaeologist nor technology expert is necessarily trained in user experience design. The projects described in papers are too often inaccessible and even less frequently preserved and the needs of the projected audience are seldom effectively evaluated.

As an antidote I will present some reflective ideas and methods, plus case studies that resolve or promise to help resolve some if not all of these issues. One way to address the importance of virtual heritage is to redefine it. I suggest virtual heritage is the attempt to convey not just the appearance but also the meaning and significance of cultural artefacts and the associated social agency that designed and used them, through the use of interactive and immersive digital media. As it has been a focus of my research I will also cover the usefulness but also danger of applying game-based design and game-based learning ideas to the development and preservation of Virtual Heritage.

upcoming article for MIT Presence (2015? 2016?)

This article may provoke some responses..

Title:
Defining Cultural Agents for Virtual Heritage Environments

For:
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments-Special Issue on “Immersive and Living Virtual Heritage: Agents and Enhanced Environments”

Keywords:
Cultural agents, virtual heritage, computational archaeology, visualization, virtual environments, immersion.

Abstract
This article describes the primary ways in which intelligent agents have been employed in virtual heritage projects and explains how the special requirements of virtual heritage environments necessitate the development of cultural agents. How do we distinguish between social agents and cultural agents? Can cultural agents meet these specific heritage objectives?

Introduction
As the call to papers for this special issue has noted, “Most heritage applications lacked a sense of immersion in terms of ‘livingness’, life, behaviour and intelligent agents in the virtual environments, and there has not been any progression in such developments since a decade ago. This criticism of “lifeless” and “sterile” digital environments (and virtual heritage environments in particular) is shared by various scholars (Papagiannakis et al., 2002; Roussou, 2008) but a simple directive to ‘populate’ a virtual environment with intelligent agents masquerading as walk-on characters will not necessarily communicate cultural significance (Bogdanovych, Rodriguez, Simoff, & Cohen, 2009). And communicating cultural significance is an objective of virtual heritage environments even if it is not a requirement of all virtual environments.

Summary
Virtual heritage environments have special needs that create more criteria than those required by mainstream digital environments and too many agent-virtual heritage projects have not communicated the significance and value of the heritage content) due to their focus on perfecting the technology. In their attempt to create more engagement, virtual environment researchers and designers have conflated social presence with cultural presence (Champion, 2005, 2011; Flynn, 2007). A solution is to develop agents who help interpret cultural cues and transmit to the human participant a sense of situated cultural presence and an awareness through place-specific and time-specific interaction of the cultural local significance of the simulated sites, artefacts and events. Such agents would be cultural agents, not merely social agents, as they would convey accummulated and place-specific cultural knowledge that would outlast or extend beyond their own individual ‘lives’

.