Category Archives: talks

Upcoming talks: Norway Iceland UK

3D and game editors, Academic, Announcements, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, heritage, serious games, talks, workshop

Thanks to echoing.eu and NTNU for inviting me to Europe.

MONDAY 16 October NTNU talk, Gunnerus Library, TRONDHEIM NORWAY 12:00-13:00

LUNCH WITH A WRITER: “PLAYING WITH THE PAST”

The eCHOing project is inviting you to a lunch lecture, join us for an exciting event that explores the fascinating world of visitor experiences in the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). Photo: gunnerus.no NTNU UB

TUESDAY 17 OCTOBER Hands-on Game Design Workshop, TRONDHEIM NORWAY, 09:30-14:30

Join us for an exciting event that explores the fascinating world of visitor experiences in the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums).

Whether you’re a student curator, librarian, archivist, or museum enthusiast, this event is a must-attend to stay ahead in the ever-evolving GLAM landscape.

In this half-day workshop Erik Champion will help small groups of 4 brainstorm (“ideate”) ideas to create engaging games using a simplified working definition of computer games, and with the help of physical items. Although these game ideas could eventually become digital games, escape rooms, augmented or mixed reality projects, this introductory workshop will concentrate on creating and testing physical (analogue) demos and simple prototypes. Although Erik’s focus has been on history and heritage games, this workshop will be open to other types of games, but particularly on those where players can learn beyond the game, and where the game is a series of engaging challenges. You may bring your own idea for a game, or develop a game idea on the day in a group. No programming necessary. 

  • Work in interdisciplinary groups with real life problems 
  • Be an agent of change as your ideas will help professionals reach a wider audience for their cultural institutions!
  • Learn the fundamentals of serious games and why so many fail.
  • Discover how paper prototyping in groups can help you quickly create engaging game ideas.

Short bio for NTNU workshop

Erik Champion tutors game jam projects in South Australia at UniSA, and has hosted game design workshops in Australia, Italy, Poland, the United States, Qatar, and Finland, and co-hosted remotely a game design workshop with school children in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) with Dr Juan Hiriart. He is currently working on research projects with Tencent Games and Ubisoft. He wrote Playing With The Past: Into The Future (Springer 2022), and edited the open access book Virtual Heritage: A Guide (Routledge, 2021) and has written books on the intersection between video games and cultural heritage. He has honorary appointments at Curtin, UWA, and ANU and was recently a visiting professor at the University of Jyvāskylā, Finland, a partner of the Centre of Excellence in Game Studies (https://coe-gamecult.org/).

Skills required: none.

The eCHOing project is an EU-funded programme that aims to foster collaboration through open innovation between universities and 29 cultural institutions in five European countries. Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to gain valuable insights from our invited gaming guru and writer of the book PLAYING WITH THE PAST.

WEDNESDAY 18 October MediaCity, Salford University, MANCHESTER, ENGLAND, UK, 15:00-19.00

Flexible Heritage Games, Extended Reality and Heritage Futures

My talk: Flexible Heritage Games, Extended Reality and Heritage Futures, focuses on XR and escape rooms, what can we learn from them?

Featuring four presentations as part of the Southern Je immersive exhibition.

FRIDAY 20 October, VR Lab, University of Iceland, REYKJAVIK, ICELAND, 14:00-16:00

Linking Digital Heritage, Games and Virtual Tourism: Menningararfur í sýndarheimum – Cultural Heritage in Virtual Worlds Symposium.

This talk will examine how key challenges in digital heritage involving 3D models could be brought to life and re-opened to interpretation by game design, and how game-like interaction could also help increase the richness and immersive qualities of XR (extended reality) and virtual tourism. Can 3D models, the scholarly information surrounding them, and the involvement of the public be brought closer together? And can we harness the speed and complexity of new technologies to ensure both the data and our understanding of that data can be recorded, interpreted, and shared more fairly, openly, and democratically?

Tickets: EVENTBRITE.

The other speakers will be talking on:

a) making digital twins of statues and monuments that can be used for different purposes in preservation and promotion (https://sketchfab.com/ListasafnEinars/models);

b) working with heritage and even heritage artefacts into a computer game https://islandofwinds.com

NB Morning Workshop on game prototyping: to be determined.

MONDAY 23 October Watershed Media Centre BRISTOL, ENGLAND, UK, 18:00-20:00

Screen Tourism and Affective Landscapes Book Launch

WEDNESDAY 25 October School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Central Square, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, WALES, UK, 16:00-17:15

Reflective Experiences with Immersive Heritage (Difficult Digital Heritage)

Despite the growth and spread of digital humanities visualisation projects, parallel and accessible examples in immersive virtual heritage are harder to find. Over the last three decades, immersive technologies (especially as “new” media) have embraced digital heritage to create spectacular experiences, but existing and durable examples of virtual heritage (virtual reality applied to cultural heritage) are relatively rare, while examples of difficult heritage far rarer. In this talk I will summarize relevant dilemmas in presence research, and recent developments in virtual heritage, reflect on some difficult lessons learnt, and offer some recommendations as to how we could address the depiction or evocation of difficult pasts in the near future.

BIO

Erik Champion is an Enterprise Fellow at UniSA, Emeritus Professor at Curtin University, Honorary Research Fellow at UWA, and Honorary Research Professor at ANU. He has published books and papers on serious games and game mods, virtual heritage, virtual world phenomenology, digital humanities infrastructures, and architectural history.

Europe in October

talks

Flights now confirmed: I have been invited to NTNU (Trondheim Norway, in conjunction with the echoing.eu project) 16-17 October and then I hope to visit and talk in the UK 18 or 19 October at the University of Salford on games (especially Assassin’s Creed and the upcoming book with Dr. Juan Hiriart), and over 23-25 October UWE Bristol (book launch of Screen Tourism and Affective Landscapes), and Cardiff University (dark and difficult digital heritage).

Milan in June 2023

Academic, Architecture, augmented reality, Conference, Digital Humanities, talks, Virtual Reality, visualisation, workshop

I have received an invitation from the ERC Advanced Project “An-iconology. Theory, History, and Practices of Environmental Images” (AN-ICON) hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” (https://an-icon.unimi.it/) to speak at the “AN-ICON” International Workshop in MILAN June 2023. An honour to be invited.

We are now organising the workshop “Real Space-Virtual Space. Aesthetics, Architecture and Immersive Environments,” scheduled on 19th-21st June 2023, dedicated to the dialogue between virtual spaces, architecture and urban planning. We will investigate this intertwining which is more and more relevant at both practical and academic level by adopting a transdisciplinary and multimethodological approach – including aesthetics, phenomenology, media studies, architectural design, urban planning, cultural heritage studies. 

The workshop will be held at the University of Milan and Milano Triennale (https://triennale.org/), the renowned Italian institution dedicated to design and architecture. 

Workshop on game prototyping

Digital Humanities, talks, virtual heritage, workshop,

I just gave a talk and mini workshop on prototyping games in Poznan Poland.

Here is a summary of the exercise I gave the cartography students, to create a game prototype in 20 minutes! (Well in the end they had more like 30 minutes)..

  • What is the goal? Why try to reach it?
  • An engaging challenge? Involves competition/mastery, chance, imitation, controlling vertigo/rush of movement/flight?
  • Feedback system? Affordances, constraints; rewards, punishments?
  • Levels up/advance via mechanics?
  • Does it offer different strategies?
  • What is learnt during or after the experience?

Artistic tools to investigate

  1. Collaborative VR Drawing=Cartography?/
  2. YouTube guide
  3. TiltVR
  4. Integrate landscapes into 3D online slides?
  5. Create Guided WebXR landscape tours?
  6. WebXR and OpenXR
  7. Pano inspiration http://www.zeutch.com/photo/past-and-present-42618
  8. Literary Atlas of Wellington Walter Langelaar VUW NZ, code.
  9. The ARtefactKit – Stu Eve

Landscape Data, Art/Artefacts & Models as Linked Open Data Perth, Australia

Announcements, archaeology, Architecture, augmented reality, Conference, digital heritage, heritage, HIVE, infrastructure, talks, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, , ,

For those interested in the above, please keep Friday 27 July 2018, open for an all-day free event in Perth.

We will be inviting speakers to talk on Australia-specific cultural issues and digital (geo) projects in relation to the above event.

More details to follow shortly and announced via http://commons.pelagios.org/:

So there is an Australian working group for Pelagios – Linked Open Data. We will run an event on 27 July at Curtin. News to follow.

http://commons.pelagios.org/2018/05/its-international-workers-day-announcing-our-2018-working-groups/

Australia LAMLOD Group: led by Erik Champion (UNESCO Chair of Cultural Visualisation and Heritage, Curtin University) and Susan Fayad (City of Ballarat), this WG seeks to address the problem of linking materials between academic research and cultural heritage in an Australian context. This is not so much about extending Pelagios linked data practice to an entirely new continent, though that is important; the problem this WG seeks to address is the multi-layered and contentious representation of cultural heritage, namely: the vast scale of Australian landscapes and historic journeys; the local and highly specific Aboriginal ways of describing, navigating and experiencing the landscapes with hundreds of different languages; and the specific problem of integrating UNESCO designated built and natural heritage with its surrounding ecosystems. The LAMLOD WG will create landscape data and visualisation displays, investigate related cultural artefact knowledge (Indigenous and colonial), and build towards the integration of linked open data and 3D models.

 

report on trip to Italy, Malta (abridged)

Conference, Digital Humanities, talks, , , , ,

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.

Public Talk: Ca Foscari University, Venice

Announcements, archaeology, talks, virtual heritage

Serious Games For History & Heritage: Learning From Triumphs & Disasters

Date: 10:00 -11.00, Monday 2 October 2016

Venue: Aula Magna Silvio Trentin,Ca’ Foscari University, Palazzo Ca’ Dolfin, Venice, Italy.

The Games Industry. In 2016, will reputedly become a 100 billion USD industry with mobile games overtaking PC and game consoles for the first time. While the year before, in 2015 Minecraft became the second highest selling game of all time, at $54 billion USD (GameCentral for Metro.co.uk, 2015; Mojang, 2016). And the year before that, in 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft for 2.5 billion US dollars. So surely it would make sense to appropriate game design to the purposes of the humanities, especially to history and heritage? In this talk I will examine the promise  of serious games and the related global industry for communicating aspects of the past, but I will also outline key issues that have hindered the employment of games for education and dissemination, and provide examples of serious games and virtual heritage projects that I have worked on over the last fifteen years.

References

  1. http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/21/video-games-will-become-a-99-6b-industry-this-year-as-mobile-overtakes-consoles-and-pcs/
  2. GameCentral for Metro.co.uk. (2015). Minecraft is now second best selling video game ever. Metro. Retrieved from Metro website: http://metro.co.uk/2014/06/26/minecraft-is-now-second-best-selling-video-game-ever-4776265/
  3. Mojang. (2016). MINECRAFT STATISTICS. Retrieved from https://minecraft.net/stats
  4. Champion, E. (2015) Critical Gaming: Interactive History And Virtual Heritage. Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities UK: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Gaming-Interactive-History-and-Virtual-Heritage/Champion/p/book/9781472422903

#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.

Planned / hopeful trips in 2016

Conference, talks, ,

START DUE CONFERENCE THEME LOCATION
Happening..
04-Apr-16 invited Interactive Pasts Exploring the intersections of archaeology & video games Leiden, The Netherlands
06-Apr-16 invited Three-dimensional Dynamic Data Visualization and Exploration for Digital Humanities Research Hamburg Germany

08-Jun-16 18-Feb-16 Presence The Power of Presence Kyoto Japan (if writing an abstract that gets accepted!)
20-Jun-16 19-Feb-16 DHA2016 DIGITAL HUMANITIES AUSTRALASIA 2016:Working with Complexity (faintly possibly) Hobart Tasmania Australia

Not sure what is happening here
22-Jun-16 invited NEH Humanities Heritage 3D Vis:Theory & Practice L.A. USA

Happening
12-Aug-16 invited Digital Collections Presenting Cultural Specificity in Digital Collections workshop NUS, Singapore

And possibly!?..
28-Sep-16 10-May-16 ICEC Entertainment Computing Vienna Austria (if writing an abstract that gets accepted!)
05-Oct-16 15-May-16 GCH2016 Graphics and Cultural Heritage  Genoa Italy (if writing an abstract that gets accepted!)
08-Oct-16 30-Jan-16 Charting the Digital Charting the Digital: Play, Discourse, Disruption Venice Italy (if writing an abstract that gets accepted!)

next trip: Digital Densities, Melbourne, 26-27 March 2015

talks, virtual heritage, , , , , , ,

Digital Densities 
A symposium examining relations between material cultures and digital data
26th – 27th March 2015, The University of Melbourne.

Hosted by the Digital Humanities Incubator (DHI) in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.

Presenters include Sarah Kenderdine, Paul Arthur, Erik Champion, Miguel Escobar, Rachel Fensham, Gillian Russell, Nick Thieberger and Deb Verhoeven.

  • Keynote Address: Prof. Sarah Kenderdine. Thursday 26th March 2015, 6-8pm McMahon Ball Theatre, Old Arts Building
  • Registration 8.45am.
  • Friday 27th March 2015, 9am – 5.30pm Linkway, 4th Floor John Medley Building

Admission is free. Bookings are Required. Seating is limited.

My abstract (and I am happy to meet and network with people the day before):

Title: Intangible Heritage, Material Culture and Digital Futures
Our experience with the material culture of situated heritage is typically embodied, personal, and unique. On the other hand, our literary understanding of the past as developed through reading of scholarly texts is typically linear, monovocal, and aplatial.  Our experience and our literary understanding are two modes of knowledge that seldom meet.
Digital humanities has/have promised to provide alternative visions to metanarrative, to frozen information, and to disembodied experiences. Digital technology has offered to destroy distance and difference. My research on the other hand, aims to restore an appreciation of distance and difference, though creating cultural constraints in immersive visualizations through both the limitations and affordances of digital technologies. Now I have proposed to UNESCO to combine game engine capabilities and consumer-level capture technologies with open access 3D cultural heritage content in new and community-maintained online archives. Can this project provide material weight to the virtual?