The following was a successful grant, funded by the Curtin Institute of Computation.
The program/research plan:
In 2016 the Chief Investigator (CI) organized a one day talk and workshop on cultural heritage visualization, (“GLAM-VR”, Curtin HIVE, http://slides.com/erikchampion/glamvr16-26-08-2016 ) and helped facilitate a related makerspace event (“Cultural Makathon at Curtin Library Makerspace”, URL: http://slides.com/erikchampion/deck-4#/fullscreen#/ ). All groups of students finished their projects apart from one single individual group encountering trouble designing inside a 3D game engine. For the Augmented Reality 2016 makerspace tutorials, there was similar difficulty in finding suitable tutorial material. Unfortunately, there are few tutorials and examples for augmented reality and 3D game engines for hackathon or makathon events. There is even less material for cultural heritage augmented reality tours. And there is no academic feature list survey and comparison of recent augmented reality headsets for cultural heritage tours, where one walks along a heritage trail using the augmented reality headset (HMD) for augmented information.
This 2017 pilot study will aim to resolve this issue by providing an exemplar, online resources, a white paper and
- The two ECRS will develop a simple digital 3D environment prototype which reveals cultural heritage assets, artefacts and landmarks when viewed inside a portable head-mounted display (HMD) or augmented reality HMD.
- We will compare the relative strengths and weaknesses of the above HMDs, run an evaluation on test subjects of preferred display, time required to navigate and to wayfind, and record participants’ task performance and memory recall.
- We will create a white paper for this, including suggested workflows and appropriate tools.
- From the above findings we will provide an online available training course for developing Augmented Reality cultural heritage tours for head Mounted Displays.
- There will be a pilot workshop at CURTIN LIBRARY MAKERSPACE