#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.
“Workshopping Board Games for Space, Place, and Culture” revised chapter, authored with Juan Hiriart, for “Playing Place” (edited by Medina Lasansky and Chad Randl, MIT Press) sent off today. Each chapter has a 1000 word limit, I believe. Took me some time to trim this! Great to work with Juan on a chapter, I think our different strengths blend well. When (or if?) the book appears on MIT Press I will add another post, the list of authors and topics looks really good, possibly essential reading if you are into boardgames, or are not, but want to know why so many people are …
Conveying built heritage values and historical knowledge through boardgame design may seem an odd decision. Communicating space, place, and culture through play is a challenge let alone through a medium inherently incapable of evoking the direct experience of inhabitation and architecture as a spatial art. Boardgames are engaging, social, quick to make, and fast to learn, intuitive or nuanced. From the complex to the spontaneous, boardgames can be effective, visceral tools for cultural immersion, challenging cultural assumptions and preconceptions, encouraging discussion and collaboration between players, provoking insight and enjoyment with simple props or intricate rules.
The following explains our experience hosting participative design workshops with historians, archaeologists, and heritage professionals. In small groups of three to four people, participants determine the design decisions, discussing and solving problems that often arise in an iterative process where historical research, game design, and play-testing both blend and butt heads.
What have I been doing this year? Playing a lot of piano, badly. But also (and I hope to add 2 journal articles and a book project and a serious game design project to this mix):
This is our proposed draft chapter (7500-9000 words) for a book on medieval modding within a game (Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim).
Ear Zow Digital, Australian National University, University of Western Australia
Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, Australian National University
Katrina Grant, Australian National University
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, through its rich modding possibilities, has great potential as a teaching and learning tool. The world of Skyrim, although “pseudo-medieval”,[1] can, through the use of mods, aim for a level of historical accuracy comparable to many scholarly digital 3D reconstruction projects. These types of projects are now widely accepted as a vehicle for a new way of thinking about old topics, and as a valuable prompt for engaging students. The advantage of using Skyrim is that the historically informed mods can be combined with sophisticated game mechanics to immerse and inspire students as procedural, contestable, and reconfigurable simulations. Through playful exploration, students can investigate the game world and engage with both the historically-informed and fantastical elements. But they can also become designers, and investigate historical developments through the creation of new assets, modified game mechanics, and social storytelling. Designing simulations is a further learning experience and Skyrim’s Creation Kit is thus also a pedagogical tool.
In this chapter we will explore ways in which Skyrim can be used and modified to explain, through play, three related aspects of medieval society: culture, architecture, and landscape. We will then discuss the modding capability of Skyrim, and conclude with some suggestions for how future Elder Scrolls games and game mods could be leveraged as a teaching and learning tool.
[1] von Lünen, Alexander, Katherine J Lewis, Benjamin Litherland, and Pat Cullum. 2019. Historia Ludens: The Playing Historian. Vol. 30. New York, USA: Routledge.
In this essay, I review key concepts in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard, 1994), their relation to the Matrix film series, and their importance in terms of hacking, especially regards to Virtual Reality (VR)…
Ok, it is a very short abstract but 3,500 words of very condensed text. Probably should expand it back to 5,000 and seek publication. It reviews Baudrillard’s famous book in the light of the move from VR to XR, and the rise in computational creativity, cybercrime and hacking. With references to the Matrix trilogy and the film Possible Worlds.
Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA – it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own.
The desert of the real itself.
“ The Precession of Simulacra” from Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan, USA: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Aim of Essay
Update and Relate Simulations and Simulcra to the current era of Hacking and Virtual Reality.
I received a distinction on my essay so I will extend it back to its draft length and send that either to a journal or add it to my 2022 book proposal on theoretical VR. My next essay to write is on hacking in VR and some of the issues on authenticity, reality, and linking to / critiquing Jean Baudrillard’s dystopic warnings (which I read 30 years ago, amazing to think how relevant they still are, with some caveats).
But I also have some book proofing sessions to undergo.
Ideally, all my major writing will be finished this week as next week, lockdown lifts pending, I hope to travel (sadly, not for a holiday).
The below is an essay for a digital learning futures class. If the paper receives good feedback and interest I may try to develop it for a journal (or subsection of a book I am planning on critical virtual reality).
This essay suggests a modification of theoretical digital literacy frameworks to ensure they are suitable for designing educational (serious) games for the GLAM sector (using libraries as my initial focus). While not a librarian, I train people to create game prototypes for more engaging ways of communicating history, heritage, and digital collections (often found in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums-the GLAM sector).
I wish to develop a framework for game design to better assess what is learnt by end-users (game prototype participants) and game prototype designers (in this case, librarians). My concept of immersive digital literacies is discussed and applied to a review of software tools for the development of serious game prototypes.
With 2 books in press, an edited book in the preview chapter- due-a-few-months-away stage, am now trying to clear my desk and have the two, no, three, below book chapters to finish (in dark red). Then, hopefully, can start a new manuscript for a major academic press (who I have not written a book for, yet, but they do seem interested).
EuroMed2020 conference proceedings have been published by Springer.
Our paper: Champion, E., Kerr, R., McMeekin, D., & Rahaman, H. (2020, 29 October-3 November). Time-Layered Gamic Interaction with a Virtual Museum Template. Paper presented at the EuroMed 2020 Conference, Nicosia, Cyprus (online).
Part 7 of the ASEAN Australia Smart Cities Webinar Series on “Promoting Smart Tourism Recovery via Virtual Reality” slide presentations and the webinar recording are now available on the ADB Knowledge Events page.
The event was held March 2, 2021. My Cultural Tourism XR slides are also available on slideshare.net
Limited free paper on AR that speaks native names of flora back to you, “Audio-augmented arboreality: wildflowers and language”, published in Digital Creativity, Volume 32 Issue 1. First 50 copies are free.
(Image by Dr Hafizur Rahaman).
2 March 1PM (AWST Perth time): Promoting Tourism Sector Recovery Via Smart Virtual Reality, ASEAN Australia Smart Cities Trust Fund – AASCTF AASCTF on ADB.org. Invited speaker for webinar.
23 March 10-4PM NSW time. Virtual heritage and communities. NSW Local Studies Librarians group via zoom.
?? March to Aberdeen [Scotland] Academic Forum.
Books to be on the way
Google reminded me of a 2017-18 summer student intern project I supervised 3 years ago. I asked Corbin Yap to calibrate Unreal to larger screens (as with the French intern hybrid reality project I have not written this up although Corbin wrote an excellent report on how to do this).
The screen is 3 metres high and 8 metres in diameter, forming a near half-circle of approx 179 degrees, designed by Paul Bourke in 2013. It can also handle stereo (which Corbin did not have time to adjust the display for). Funding by Curtin Institue for Computation. Corbin was hosted in the library makerspace, great people to work with. Presentation was, I believe, 16 February 2018. Yes I wanted to port my Palenque models but the then-new version of Unreal would require a complete rebuild.
If I have the chance to teach game design again I would greatly appreciated having access to a similar environment that is accessible and immediate for game content. I have many ideas for this.
For the below I have written grants and delivered presentations but some are still to be be completed:
I have started an 18 chapter 25 author edited book project with De Gruyter (Video Games and the Humanities series) and Dr Juan Hiriart as co-editor. I hope to publish it in 2022. Confirmed authors are from Canada, USA, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. The aim is to explain how the Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed Series can and has and could be used in the classroom, museum, or gallery (or as escape space). De Gruyter and Ubisoft historians have been very encouraging. I’d love contributions from the Caribbean or Middle East but very happy with what we have going forward.
There is some possibility of related online learning materials being made available.
Alternative title: Assassin’s Creed: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?
NB This is not the final chapter order.
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 |
Ear Zow Digital