Category Archives: augmented reality

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.

 

AR/MR case studies and zombies on a dig

archaeology, augmented reality, Biofeedback, game, heritage, virtual heritage

Why do we use augmented reality for heritage? To show what is not there, navigate and orient people, to reveal what is created intangibly by our indirect actions, or to reveal our impact on material remains..

But AR/MR/games can reveal archaeological methods along with intrinsic reasons to play games, zombies!

Zombies are slow and can be animated or rendered clumsily; they provide a protagonist on limited AI resources; they are associated with death, decay and the past. We have some experience with zombies and biofeedback or skeletons and archaeology..

  • Example: Library Skills, Archival and archaeology methods
  • Goal: The goal can be serious exploration; but with imaginative constraints and settings.
  • Game mechanic: For example: dig up zombie, match to correct time using dating methods
  • Feedback: If correctly matched to time period, zombies are animated and run amok.
  • Setting: archaeological dig, a mortuary or a library.
  • Affordance: Find artefacts that placate zombies; mortuaries require following correct rituals to rebury zombies; library archives inform player of artefacts of value to zombies-find books of power to protect against zombies.
  • Reward: Videos or machinima augmented glimpses of potential past/individual narratives.
  • Game platform: does it have to be 3D? Could it be designed in minecraft (open source or otherwise), minetest, or terrania? Augmented reality: how could it be involved? Oh I have some ideas but that would be telling and I’d have to charge..

Augmented reality development: ARKit or ARCore?

augmented reality, Conference

Augmented reality is both promising and cutting edge, even interaction paradigms may need to change:

There are two new major augmented reality frameworks, one for Apple iOS (see Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Studio Unreal/Apple ARKit example) and ARCore for Google phones..which should you consider, ARKit or ARCore? (https://developers.google.com/ar/discover/ ) see https://medium.com/super-ventures-blog/how-is-arcore-better-than-arkit-5223e6b3e79d …

OR side-by-side https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNXBvDKRg1M

A good feature list comparison: https://www.newgenapps.com/blog/arkit-vs-arcore-the-key-differences

The opportunities for archaeology are huge: http://www.dead-mens-eyes.org/arkit-and-archaeology-hougoumont-farm-waterloo/

I said two options, but there are many, plus there is the more expensive HoloLens option (self contained totally portable mixed reality system with figure gesture recognition) and the new meta HMD, with wider field of view (90 degrees and about a third less in price).

The HoloLens at Curtin

 

 

The latest book that isn’t (yet)

Academic, augmented reality, Book, Digital Humanities, heritage, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality,

The book that isn’t, I just drafted and sent for internal academic/publisher review a book on virtual places. So it may be modified, it may not get finally published (not sure what happens, I signed a contract) but I cannot resist listing some of the issues it tries to cover, hope they are issues for you too..

Continue reading The latest book that isn’t (yet) →

new project 1: HMD Augmented Reality Heritage Trail study

augmented reality, digital heritage, heritage, tracking, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, workshop, , , , ,

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. We will create a white paper for this, including suggested workflows and appropriate tools.
  4. From the above findings we will provide an online available training course for developing Augmented Reality cultural heritage tours for head Mounted Displays.
  5. There will be a pilot workshop at CURTIN LIBRARY MAKERSPACE

Augmented Reality software

augmented reality

In short:

And perhaps a few other options (https://artoolkit.org/ and http://www.mixare.org/) I will update this post with later.

The software field changes so quickly even Wikipedia has trouble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_augmented_reality_software

Alternatives

Other references

CFP: PRESENCE Call for Papers – “VR/AR in Culture and Heritage” (deadline March 2017)

Announcements, augmented reality, game, Journal, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, ,

A new Call for Papers:

This special issue will be highly interdisciplinary in nature, and submissions which promote collaboration between science and engineering and arts and humanities will be welcomed. The Call is attached in .pdf fom, and is also accessible from the PRESENCE home page:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/pres

PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
An MIT Press Science & Technology Journal
Visit us at mitpressjournals.org/loi/pres

==========
Scope and Topics
Virtual heritage is a testament to the impact of digital transformation in the arts and humanities, and a driving force for technological innovation generated through the arts and humanities’ increasing appetite for digital technology. In this special issue, we aim to examine present trends in culture and heritage within the context of virtual reality and augmented reality. The scope of the special issue includes the following topics:

• New approaches in culture and heritage applications and interpretations
• Responsive, adaptive and evolvable behaviors in immersive virtual environments that capture culture and tangible and intangible heritage
• Multiuser virtual environments
• Mixed reality and the experience of real and virtual environments
• Presence and phenomenology in culture and heritage applications
• High definition imaging, stereoscopic displays, interactive cinema
• Intelligent and High Performance Computing for Virtual Cultural Heritage
• Ubiquitous computing and new forms of culture and heritage representations via VR and AR
• VR and AR in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums
• Interactive Exhibits in Public Spaces
• Digital Transformations of Museums with Immersive & Interactive Time Machines
• VR and AR as a narrative
• Education in culture and heritage via VR and AR
• Tools, techniques, frameworks and methodologies
• Virtual environments case studies

Schedule
• Manuscript submission deadline: March 1, 2017
• Final revisions: September 1, 2017
• Planned publication: PRESENCE 27-1 (Early 2018)

Submissions
Manuscripts should conform to the journal’s submission guidelines:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/page/sub/pres

Authors, please note that audio and video files can be hosted as supplementary onlinematerial accompanying published articles. For more information about multimedia file formats and submission guidelines, please contact presence@mit.edu.

Contact
Dr. Eugene Ch’ng, Director, NVIDIA Joint-Lab on Mixed Reality, University of Nottingham (China Campus). Email: eugene.chng@nottingham.edu.cn

Further information: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/pres
==========

Curtin Cultural Makathon

Academic, augmented reality, Biofeedback, design, digital heritage, game, heritage, infrastructure, respositories, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, workshop, , , , ,

Hack/slash/cut/bash/scrape/mod/mash – it’s a culture thing

Join the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts and Curtin Library Makerspace to hack cultural datasets and heritage information.

Use government and institutional research data, gallery, library, archive and museum information as data sources. Experiment with data for a research project or proposal; create something accessible, beautiful and/or useful using craft, games, augmented or virtual reality, apps or something else: it’s up to you.

Date:    Thursday 10 November 2016 (afternoon) & Friday 11 November 2016 (9am – 5pm)

Location: Makerspace, level two, Robertson Library (building 105), Curtin University,  Kent Street, Bentley

Registration: Free via Eventbrite

For more information visit the Curtin Cultural Makathon website.

To volunteer to assist with data or to sponsor a prize please contact Dr Lise Summers or Dr Karen Miller.

Curtin Cultural Makathon is funded by a MCCA strategic grant. For more details on the project contact Professor Erik Champion.

#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

GLAM-VR

Academic, augmented reality, Conference, Digital Humanities, Symposium, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, , , , , , ,

 Event: GLAMVR short talks and workshop (Friday 26 August, THE HIVE, from 9:00AM)

On Friday 26 August (just before Curtin Research week) a School of Media Culture and Creative Arts academics, Curtin University Library and friends will host at the HIVE a morning series of short presentations.

The main themes are:

  • Digital Heritage: Workflows and issues in preserving, exporting and linking digital collections (especially heritage collections).
  • Scholarly Making: How to encourage makerspaces & other activities in tandem with academic research.
  • Experiential Media: How to learn and develop AR/VR and other new media technology and projects especially for the humanities.

Primary Objectives:

  1. To encourage humanities and especially digital humanities research, connecting research project ideas with an idea of possible equipment and the skills required.
  2. To get people together to discuss their projects and get feedback
  3. To help push forward prototypes and proof-of-concepts
  4. To uncover potential design ideas and available datasets for the Cultural Hackathon later in the year (see below).

Friday Morning: Short Presentations (on Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media)
Speakers include

  • Assistant Professor Elaine Sullivan, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA, who will speak on Digital Karnak.
  • Mr Conal Tuohy, software developer from Brisbane, will speak on digital collections, visualisation and Linked Open Data.
  • Short presentations from academics at Curtin and there may be a few slots available to others in Perth.

Friday Afternoon: Digital Workflows/Augmented Reality WORKSHOP (3-3.5 hours)

In the afternoon Mr Michael Wiebrands will present workflows on importing digital records and other media assets into the UNITY game engine and he will be followed by Mr Dominic Manley, who will demonstrate Augmented Reality (AR) technology and how to use AR in research projects.

 

Cultural Hackathon, October/November 2016

In October or November we plan to host a CULTURAL HACKATHON. Academics propose ideas, and provide datasets (and so can Libraries, Galleries, Archives and Museums). Hobbyists, programmers, students will spend the entire day in teams working on application prototypes using that data and the VR/AR equipment provided. Proof of concept ideas will be presented and the best project will win a prize and the chance to work with the academics in the near future.

PLEASE NOTE: The event is free for attendees but they will have to register at EVENTBRITE (link to follow) for either the morning presentations or the afternoon workshop. We recommend people register and attend both but having separate registrations is to encourage those who can only make one session. Numbers will be limited.

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.

CFP: Virtual Reality Games, International Journal of Computer Games Technology

3D and game editors, augmented reality, Conference, game, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality

We are currently accepting submissions for our upcoming Special Issue titled “Virtual Reality Games,” which will be published in International Journal of Computer Games Technology in April 2017. The Special Issue is open to both original research articles and review articles, and the deadline for submission is November 25, 2016. You can find the Call for Papers at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/si/787829/cfp/.

International Journal of Computer Games Technology has been accepted for coverage in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, which is a new edition of the Web of Science that was launched in November 2015. This means that any article published in the journal will be indexed in the Web of Science at the time of publication. The journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access publication, which means that all published articles are made freely available online at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/ without a subscription and authors retain the copyright of their work.

Please read over the journal’s author guidelines at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/guidelines/ for more information on the journal’s policies and the submission process. Manuscripts should be submitted online to the Special Issue at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/ijcgt/vrga/.

3D models: Advanced challenges, UCLA

3D and game editors, archaeology, Architecture, augmented reality, Conference, digital heritage, heritage, infrastructure, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, ,

Daisy-O’lice I. Williams, University of Oregon, presents to the insitute on day 1, 20 June 2016, UCLA.

I was very fortunate to be invited to the NEH-funded Advanced Challenges in Theory and Practice in 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites Institute, hosted at University of Massachusetts in 2015 and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) 20-23 June 2016.
Some points I noticed reoccurring over the four days (and which I also added to the #neh3D twitter stream) were:

  1. People are still inventing the wheel when it comes to interaction in virtual environments. But you all knew that anyway.
  2. There is still a gap between educators and libraries who just want to get projects made, students engaged, and assets saved and those who talk about the big metadata / ontology questions. Nobody apart from Piotr used CIDOC-CRM for example and as he and I agreed, there needs to be more useful examples for archaeologists and architects.
  3. We still need an open source augmented reality platform: Content providers will try to lock you in to their own devices (http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/602484/google-building-its-own-smartphone-report-says/) and AR software is commercial, risky and when the AR company disappears so does your augmented reality project! To add insult to injury many AR software apps store you models offline or in a secure cloud so you cannot directly access them even though you made them.[I have just heard of ARGON, will have to investigate].
  4. There is no suitable 3D model+scholarly journal, the editor in chief of Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Bernard Frischer, admitted their 3D solution was not yet a fully usable solution plus Elsevier say they own the model. Actually, I think the ownership of the scholarly content is as much an issue as the lack of a suitable 3D viewer. Other journals that may offer similar issues but 3D model potential are http://intarch.ac.uk/ (“All our content is open access”) and ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH). However at the workshop one of the founders of SCALAR expressed interest in exploring 3D for SCALAR so hopefully something eventuates with this working party.

Many thanks to Alyson Gill (UMass) and Lisa Snyder (UCLA) for the opportunity to hear about US developments and the really cool CULTURAL HERITAGE MARKUP LANGUAGE CIDOC_CRM project that Piotr Kuroczyński (Herder Institute Germany) presented.

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.