#CFP I was invited onto the program committee for IEEE International Workshop on “Mixed Reality Implications on Cultural Heritage Experience (MrICHE)”.
The workshop will be held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2021, https://ismar21.org), 4-8 October 2021, Bari, Italy.
Submit: 4-8 page papers by 23 June! IEEE format. https://fcrlab.unime.it/calls/mriche2021 #ismar #culturalheritage #mixedreality #augmentedreality
For a Digital Learning Futures unit, I created a prototype website on gitbook with resources for Immersive Literacy (and XR via AFrame run and edited inside CodePen) as a potential teaching unit.
I also wrote a report (which won’t go online for now) but I’d like to thank the academics, students, teachers, librarians, and heritage practitioners, who provided feedback.
I am not sure this will be the final title but just finished (I hope) my editing for the following open access 10 chapter book: Virtual Heritage: A Guide, Ubiquity Press 2021.
Table of contents:
| Foreword | Stuart Jeffrey | |
| Virtual Heritage: from Archives to Joysticks | Ear Zow Digital | |
| 1 | Speculating the Past: 3D Reconstruction in Archaeology | R. P. Barratt |
| 2 | Photogrammetry: What, How and Where | Hafizur Rahaman |
| 3 | Animating the Past | Michael Carter |
| 4 | Mapping Ancient Heritage With Digital Tools | Anna Foka, David McMeekin, Kyriaki Konstantinidou, Nasrin Mostofian, Elton Barker, Cenk Demiroglu, Ethan Chiew, Brady Kiesling |
| 5 | Hybrid Interactions in Museums: Why Materiality Still Matters | Luigina Ciolfi |
| 6 | Video Games as concepts and experiences of the past | Aris Politopoulos, Angus Mol |
| 7 | Mixed Reality: A Bridge or a Fusion between Two Worlds? | Mafkereseb Bekele |
| 8 | Getting it Right and Getting it Wrong in Digital Archaeological Ethics | L. Meghan Dennis |
| 9 | Evaluation in Virtual Heritage | Panayiotis Koutsabasis |
| 10 | Preserving Authenticity in Virtual Heritage | Ear Zow Digital |
Virtual Archaeology Review declared my and Dr Rahaman’s 2020 paper “Survey of #3D digital heritage repositories and platforms” their paper of the year.
New article
Hafizur Rahaman, Michelle Johnston & Erik Champion (2021). Audio-augmented arboreality: wildflowers and language, Digital Creativity, DOI: 10.1080/14626268.2020.1868536 free for first 50 people:
Before colonization, there were over 250 languages spoken in Australia. Today only thirteen Indigenous languages are still being taught to children). Language has an important part to play in cultural maintenance and ‘closing the gap’ in terms of First Peoples’ cultural heritage, identity, and sense of belonging. In this work, we aim to develop an engaging and easy way to teach and learn the local Indigenous names of wildflowers using a mobile device. This paper presents the development of a phone application that runs on a local machine, recognizes local wildflowers through its camera, and plays associated sounds and displays associated text in the Noongar language. The prototype mobile application has been developed with MobileNets model on the TensorFlow platform. The dataset is derived from Google searches, while the sound files are generated from label text by running an apple script. UI and interactivity have been developed by using Vuforia and the Unity game engine. Finally, the Android Studio is used to deploy the app. At this point in time, the prototype can only recognize ten local flowers, with 85%∼99% of accuracy. We are working with a larger dataset towards developing the full application.
LE210100021 — The University of Melbourne
Australian Cultural Data Engine for Research, Industry and Government. The project aims to develop an Australian Cultural Data Engine (ACD-Engine), which will be an open software engineering facility that interacts with leading existing cultural databases in architecture, visual and performing arts, humanities, and heritage to build a bridge to information and social sciences. The ACD-Engine will unify and expand these disparate and previously unconnected systems to allow advanced analysis techniques to be performed. It will deliver innovative and searchable formats that ensure interoperability, improved search, interactive design and interpretation aids that will benefit the policy and planning for national and international alignments between researchers, industry and government.
Was one of two book covers possible and I think due to some email confusion they didn’t choose my preferred cover but I really appreciate permission by Dr Anthony Masinton to use his rendered image. The publisher of Rethinking Virtual Places will be Indiana University Press, via their Spatial Humanities Series.
Champion, E. (2020). Culturally Significant Presence in Single-player Computer Games. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 13(4). doi:10.1145/3414831. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3414831
Cultural presence is a term used to explain and evaluate cultural learning in virtual heritage projects but is less frequently used for video games. Given the increasing importance of video games to cultural heritage, this article investigates explanations of cultural presence that could be communicated by games, especially concerning UNESCO and ICOMOS definitions of cultural significance. The aim is to determine if cultural presence can be communicated via video games and across a range of game genres.
Observations derived from game prototyping workshops for history and heritage aided the development of a teachable list of desirable game elements. To distinguish itself from the vagueness surrounding theories of cultural presence, a theory of culturally significant presence is proposed. Culturally significant presence requires three components: culturally significant artifacts and practices; an overarching framework of a singular, identifiable cultural viewpoint; and awareness by the participant of both the culturally significant and the overarching cultural framework and perspective (which gives sites, artifacts, and practices their cultural significance and relational value).
As awareness of cultural presence requires time for reflection, single-player games were chosen that were not completely dependent on time-based challenges. Another criterion was cultural heritage content: They must simulate aspects of heritage and history, communicate a specific cultural framework, or explore and reconstruct a past culture. Four games were chosen that simulate a culture, explain archaeological methods, portray indigenous intangible heritage, or explain historical-based ecosystems of the past based on educational guidelines. The games are Assassin’s Creed: Origins; Heaven’s Vault; Never Alone; and a Ph.D. project: Saxon. Their genres could be described as first-person shooter/open world/virtual tour; dialogue-based puzzle game; 2D platform game; and turn-based strategy game.
The aim is not to evaluate the entire range of interactive virtual environments and games, but to examine the applicability and relevance of this new theory and to ascertain whether the four games provided useful feedback on the concept and usefulness of culturally significant presence. A more clearly demarcated theory may not only help focus evaluation studies but also encourage game developers to modify or allow modification of commercial games for classroom teaching of digital heritage.
25 November 2020 (virtual invited talk to Uppsala University Sweden)
From virtual museums to virtual worlds, the word “virtual” is both a popular and a vague term. Although popularised by computer science and science fiction, the field of virtuality is also of interest to the humanities, and especially to historians and heritage experts. Yet there are few courses in the area, and few accessible examples of successful virtual humanities projects. Why? And what can be done?
public seminar series for the research network Digital Humanities Uppsala:
25 November 2020 10.15-12 Swedish time (GMT+1)
The seminar will be held on Zoom. Link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/66954058750
My slides for the below EuroMed2020 paper presentation yesterday are on slideshare. We were told the publications will be available at latest in January 2021.
Time-Layered Gamic Interaction with a Virtual Museum Template
Erik Champion, Rebecca Kerr, Hafizur Rahaman and David McMeekin
Abstract. This paper discusses a simplified workflow and interactive learning opportunities for exporting map and location data using a free tool, Recogito into a Unity game environment with a simple virtual museum room template. The aim was to create simple interactive virtual museums for humanities scholars and students with a minimum of programming or gaming experience, while still allowing for interesting time-related tasks. The virtual environment template was created for the Oculus Quest and controllers but can be easily adapted to other head-mounted displays or run on a normal desktop computer. Although this is an experimental design, it is part of a project to increase the use of time-layered cultural data and related mapping technology by humanities researchers.
My presentation slides for virtual The Interactive Pasts Conference Online 2 (TIPC2), (held 5-6 November, notionally, at Leiden) are on slideshare.
The twitch stream for the conference is at https://www.twitch.tv/valuefnd (my talk from yesterday is on there somewhere).
This paper explores Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey as a way to explore idyllic historic landscapes and heritage sites with some degree of questing and simulated danger. It applies Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey in two ways, as discovery tour option mode and as a metaphor to explore in more general and speculative terms how questing and historical dilemmas and conflicts could be incorporated into both fan tourism and cultural/historical tourism (Politopoulos, Mol, Boom, & Ariese, 2019).
Keza MacDonald views Assassin’s Creed as a virtual museum, Ubisoft regards it as the recovery of lost worlds: “ “We give access to a world that was lost” said Jean Guesdon (MacDonald, 2018). “Discovery Tour will allow a lot of our players to revisit this world with their kids, or even their parents.”
Origins’ Discovery Tour mode “promises” educational enlightenment (Thier, 2018; Walker, 2018); Odyssey’s additional Story Creator Mode (Zagalo, 2020) adds personalized quests. Beyond the polaroid fun of sharing landscape selfies with other players and ancient history voyeurs across the Internet, there is also the prospect of “Video game–induced tourism: a new frontier for destination marketers” (Dubois & Gibbs, 2018). Plus physical location VR games. Game company Ubisoft created escape game VR and virtual tours inside physical exhibitions such as Assassin’s Creed VR – Temple of Anubis (Gamasutra Staff, 2019). Is there a market for historical playgrounds as virtual tourism?
The paper “Time-Layered Gamic Interaction with a Virtual Museum Template” by Erik Champion, Rebecca Kerr, Hafizur Rahaman and David McMeekin will be presented virtually at EuroMed 2020 Conference next week. The project is part of the ARC funded project Time Layered Culture Map (tlc). Registration is free.
Abstract. This paper discusses a simplified workflow and interactive learning opportunities for exporting map and location data using a free tool, Recogito into a Unity game environment with a simple virtual museum room template. The aim was to create simple interactive virtual museums for humanities scholars and students with a minimum of programming or gaming experience, while still allowing for interesting time-related tasks. The virtual environment template was created for the Oculus Quest and controllers but can be easily adapted to other head-mounted displays or run on a normal desktop computer. Although this is an experimental design, it is part of a project to increase the use of time-layered cultural data and related mapping technology by humanities researchers.
Has anyone written on gaps (in power, features, or connection, etc.) between offsite (desktop virtual environments (VEs), and headset VEs) and mobile device-based AR/MR that augments the experience onsite?
Seems to me the offsite desktop environments (and headset VR) experiences are often silos while the onsite/mobile (phone or tablet) AR/MR experiences are typically limited, break down easily, and don’t fully leverage connectivity potential.
I have seen papers on either platform, of course, but not papers explaining why we are missing great potential synergy between the two: offside VR/VE and onsite XR (MR AR).
“A Comparative Evaluation of Geospatial Semantic Web Frameworks for Cultural Heritage” has been published in Heritage and is available online.
by Ikrom Nishanbaev 1,*, Ear Zow Digital 1,2,3 and David A. McMeekin 4,5
Abstract:
Recently, many Resource Description Framework (RDF) data generation tools have been developed to convert geospatial and non-geospatial data into RDF data. Furthermore, there are several interlinking frameworks that find semantically equivalent geospatial resources in related RDF data sources. However, many existing Linked Open Data sources are currently sparsely interlinked. Also, many RDF generation and interlinking frameworks require a solid knowledge of Semantic Web and Geospatial Semantic Web concepts to successfully deploy them. This article comparatively evaluates features and functionality of the current state-of-the-art geospatial RDF generation tools and interlinking frameworks. This evaluation is specifically performed for cultural heritage researchers and professionals who have limited expertise in computer programming. Hence, a set of criteria has been defined to facilitate the selection of tools and frameworks. In addition, the article provides a methodology to generate geospatial cultural heritage RDF data and to interlink it with the related RDF data. This methodology uses a CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) ontology and interlinks the RDF data with DBpedia. Although this methodology has been developed for cultural heritage researchers and professionals, it may also be used by other domain professionals.
PDF Version: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-9408/3/3/48/pdf
I’m very happy that my rather large article “Culturally Significant Presence
In Single-Player Computer Games” has been accepted for the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage. This is despite its 12,587 words covering 4 major games, and attempting to be more conceptual and provocative than normal in a traditional ACM IT-oriented journal..
Very good reviewers too, actually. They made me work hard. I think my abstract is a bit over JOCCH length so that may change but at moment it is:
Cultural presence is a term that researchers have used to explain and evaluate cultural learning in virtual heritage projects, but less frequently in video games. Given the increasing importance of video games to cultural heritage, this paper investigates explanations of cultural presence that could be communicated by games, especially concerning UNESCO and ICOMOS definitions of cultural significance. The aim is to determine if cultural presence can be communicated via video games and across a range of game genres.
Observations derived from game prototyping workshops for history and heritage were incorporated to help develop a teachable list of desirable game elements. To distinguish itself from the vagueness surrounding theories of cultural presence, a theory of culturally significant presence is proposed. Culturally significant presence requires three components: culturally significant artifacts and practices; an overarching framework of a singular, identifiable cultural viewpoint; and awareness by the participant of both the culturally significant and the overarching cultural framework and perspective (which gives cultural heritage sites, artifacts and practices their cultural significance and relational value).
As awareness of cultural presence requires time to reflect upon, single-player games were chosen that were not completely dependent on time-based challenges. Another criterion was cultural heritage content, the games must simulate aspects of cultural heritage and history, communicate a specific cultural framework, or explore and reconstruct a past culture. Four games were chosen that simulate a culture, explain archaeological methods, portray indigenous intangible heritage, or explain historical-based ecosystems of the past based on educational guidelines. The games are Assassin’s Creed: Origins (and its Discovery Tour); Heaven’s Vault; Never Alone; and a Ph.D. game project: Saxon. Their genres could be described as first-person shooter/open world/virtual tour; dialogue-based puzzle game; 2D platform game; and turn-based strategy game.
The aim is not to evaluate the entire range of interactive and immersive virtual environments and games, but to examine the applicability and relevance of the new theory, and to ascertain whether the four games provided useful feedback on the concept and usefulness of culturally significant presence. A more clearly demarcated theory of cultural presence may not only help focus evaluation studies but also encourage game developers to modify or allow the modification of commercial games for classroom teaching of digital heritage. Game content, core gameplay, secondary gameplay, and game mechanics could be modified to engagingly compel players to consider cultural heritage values and perspectives that are not their own.
The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places
In preprint, not proofed and not correctly paginated version, is available.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of book chapters published by Routledge in Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places, in 2018, the proofed, official version is available for purchase online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315106267 OR https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315106267
Or you can download the chapters from this link: The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places
I mentioned this before (it went through 3 years of reviews) but the (updated) Rethinking Virtual Places book (97,000 words, approx 30 images) will be published by Indiana University Press in The Spatial Humanities series. Probably in 2021.
| 1-A Potted History of Virtual Reality |
| 2-Dead, Dying, Failed Worlds |
| 3-Architecture: Places Without People |
| 4-Theories of Place & Cyberspace |
| 5-Rats & Goosebumps-Mind, Body & Embodiment |
| 6-Games are not Interactive Places |
| 7-Do Serious Gamers Learn From Place? |
| 8-Cultural Places |
| 9-Evaluating Sense of Place, Virtual Places & Virtual Worlds |
| 10-Place-Making Interfaces & Platforms |
| 11-Conclusion |
I’ve been thinking of asking historians, art historians and archaeologists, if they would like to contribute to a new edited book, primarily (or only) on Assassin’s Creed. How do they or could they use it for teaching and research. What new features would they love to see? Could we get some of the professional historians who advised on the series to write their thoughts, advice, and experiences? Perhaps even one of the game designers who worked on the series?
What would be a good title?
References
I was asked on ABC radio today if there is an online directory of all the great VR projects (travel, tourism etc). Either that or a way for searching for VR projects by specific formats, directly.
I don’t know of any but there should be-would make a great archival research project as well (reason: challenging!). Should I talk to Google?
Dr Hafizur Rahaman and I will have an article on virtual /digital 3D heritage repositories published/in press at open-access journal Virtual Archaeology Review – they have interesting articles in press I recommend the journal.
The article is called Survey of 3D Digital Heritage Repositories and Platforms, update: an early version is online:
Champion, E., & Rahaman, H. (2020). Survey of 3D Digital Heritage Repositories and Platforms. The Virtual Archaeology Review (VAR), 11(23). https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2020.13226
Despite the increasing number of three-dimensional (3D) model portals and online repositories catering for digital heritage scholars, students and interested members of the general public, there are very few recent academic publications that offer a critical analysis when reviewing the relative potential of these portals and online repositories. Solid reviews of the features and functions they offer are insufficient; there is also a lack of explanations as to how these assets and their related functionality can further the digital heritage (and virtual heritage) field, and help in the preservation, maintenance, and promotion of real-world 3D heritage sites and assets. What features do they offer? How could their feature list better cater for the needs of the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector?
This article’s priority is to examine the useful features of 8 institutional and 11 commercial repositories designed specifically to host 3D digital models. The available features of their associated 3D viewers, where applicable, are also analysed, connecting recommendations for future-proofing with the need to address current gaps and weaknesses in the scholarly field of 3D digital heritage. Many projects do not address the requirements stipulated by charters, such as access, reusability, and preservation. The lack of preservation strategies and examples highlights the oxymoronic nature of virtual heritage (oxymoronic in the sense that the virtual heritage projects themselves are seldom preserved). To study these concerns, six criteria for gauging the usefulness of the 3D repositories to host 3D digital models and related digital assets are suggested. The authors also provide 13 features that would be useful additions for their 3D viewers.
Ear Zow Digital