Virtual Crowds in a Digital Colosseum

Built Environment Technologies and Healthy Architectures, 2018

This article proposes a methodology for the cross-disciplinary study and analysis of complex urban realities, such as the historic city of Nicosia, Cyprus, the last divided capital of Europe, with the use of advanced digital tools for the creation and development of real-time virtual environments for research and collaboration that explore the capacity of analysing data of users' behaviour in space. This research envisions contributing a fresh understanding of cultural and functional pressures in Nicosia's contested urban environment through the analysis of observational data. The objective of this research is development of a digital platform, which through immersion, interactive design and crowd simulation will enable the evaluation of alternative planning scenarios and design interventions in the context of the management plan of built heritage in open public spaces that used to be popular within the urban fabric of European cities but are now forgotten or in limbo due to political, economic, or social pressures.

Este artículo trata de una proyecta de reconstrucción virtual de un sitio completo arqueológico, el santuario arcaico de Sicilia en la acrópolis de la Montaña de Polizzello. El programa de investigación, denominado 'Virtual Acrópolis' se ha desarrollado con el fin de permitir que la experiencia de visitar un entorno 3D reconstruido y es completamente interactivo e inmersivo en un paisaje realista. Es una visita que, es imposible en el mundo hoy a causa de los trabajos de restauración aún en curso. Para mejorar la hipótesis de los arqueólogos acerca de los rituales y las actuaciones que se llevaron a cabo en el santuario, todos los objetos votivas y las ofrendas fueron recreados digitalmente y situado en su posición original. Un avatar de un adorador se usa en el modelo interactivo para experimentar cómo un día cualquiera se encontraba en un santuario arcaico. Esto se hizo con la ayuda de las fuentes arqueológicas y literarias recogidas. Además, la aplicación de esta técnica representa la frontera más reciente en las políticas dirigidas a la promoción del patrimonio cultural y arqueológico.

Buildings

This paper is related to the field of digital-informed modelling of heritage assets (HBIM). The scientific literature has been addressing this topic for years with many different facets: focusing digitalization on the analysis and modelling of heritage asset geometries, construction, development over time, or the representation of materials and degradations. This research aims not only to optimize the common digital workflows but also to demonstrate the effectiveness of digitalization and virtual reality applications in preserving the memory of places. Furthermore, a strategy for the maintenance of cultural heritage through virtual reality in a participatory process is proposed. The applied method develops appropriate new workflows and tools to enable enjoyment of monuments of the developed case study remotely; moreover, it allows the creation of content from ordinary users that can be incorporated into the digital models over time. Therefore, virtual and augmented reality environme...

Digital Heritage, 2010

The communication of cultural heritage in public spaces such as museums or exhibitions, gain more and more importance during the last years. The possibilities of interactive 3D applications open a new degree of freedom beyond the mere presentation of static visualizations, such as pre-produced video or image data. A user is now able to directly interact with 3D virtual environments that enable the depiction and exploration of digital cultural heritage artefacts in real-time. However, such technology requires concepts and strategies for guiding a user throughout these scenarios, since varying levels of experiences within interactive media can be assumed. This paper presents a concept as well as implementation for communication of digital cultural heritage in public spaces, by example of the project Roman Cologne. It describes the results achieved by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, designers, and computer graphics engineers with the aim to virtually reconstruct an interactive high-detail 3D city model of Roman Cologne.

As often happens, many monuments are affected, for various reasons, by an inevitable trouble: the artefacts preserved inside them until the discover have been brought into some museum, because (e.g.) the monumental structures had to be restored (in most cases with provisional works) in order to prevent their collapse. One consequence of this moving is the de-contextualization of the grave goods and the nonvalorisation of monumental archaeological contexts. An effective solution for these issues can be achieved from the use of technologies that allow the virtual enjoyment of these monuments and the virtual set-up of the grave goods in their original contexts. This paper presents the project “Marta Racconta. Storie Virtuali di Tesori Nascosti”, co-financed by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Puglia, carried out by CNR-IBAM (Lecce, Italy) in order to provide the installation of a Virtual Platform in the National Archaeological Museum of Taranto (MARTA). The main purpose of this project is to make ‘accessible’ ancient monuments from the Greek Taras (the ancient Taranto) currently inaccessible to visitors. These are: the Tomb of the Athlete of Taranto, Tomb of the Festoons, and the Hypogeum of the Gorgons, was discovered some years ago in Via Otranto. From a technological point of view, we have developed a Real Time 3D platform for a stereoscopic immersive visit, in which a navigation system with ‘natural interface’ was implemented, where the commands are executed with simple hand gestures. Through this technology, the visitor will have the opportunity to follow a path of integrated knowledge starting from heterogeneous contents, which will allow the access to historical and archaeological data, the archaeometric analyses and the spatial navigation within a hyperrealistic environment where it will be possible to interact with the three-dimensional structures, to query the Database and to explore, interactively, the funerary finds.

2016

Necessary background and potential target audience for the tutorial: experience with computer animation is recommended but not mandatory. The course is intended for animators, designers, and students in computer sci-ence. Detailed outline of the tutorial The necessity to model virtual populations appears in many applications of computer animation and simula-tion. Such applications encompass several different do-mains – representative or autonomous agents in virtual environments, human factors analysis, training, educa-tion, simulation-based design, and entertainment. Re-produce in simulation the dynamic life of virtual envi-ronments in real-time is also a great challenge. For many years, this was a challenge to produce real-

Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and South East Asia, 2005

PhD in Computer Science "An illumination registration model for dynamic virtual humans in mixed reality",

November 2011 saw the opening of the exhibition “Archeovirtual” organized by CNR ITABC -Virtual Heritage Lab - and V-MusT Network of Excellence, in Paestum, Italy. The event, that was part of a wider European project focus on virtual museums, turned to be a great opportunity to show many different projects, applications and installations about Virtual Reality and Cultural Heritage. The four-days exhibition was an occasion to get in touch with the newest experiences with virtual reconstructions, 3D models, interactive environments, augmented realities and mobile solutions for cultural contents; at the same time, it was an opportunity for organizers to directly face the audience’s impact towards projects, because of the necessity to investigate more on social and behavioral aspects in order to positively affect the learning benefits of public. So doing, we could build in the future applications much more tailored on the final costumers, closer to their abilities and necessities. During the show four types of investigative tools was implied to evaluate the general visitor’s behavior and the effectiveness of interfaces, understand their expectations and experiences, and obtain a reference grid of values to evaluate if users' experience fit with organizers' ones. The first outcomes said that audience’s impact toward interactive applications seems depending on the capability of technology to be “invisible”; otherwise technology has to assure a wide range of possibilities in content accesses. In definitive, virtual museums need to have an always more integrated approach between cultural contents, interfaces and social and behavioral studies.

… , lien social, lectures colloquium, University of Crete, …, 2004

Virtual museum exhibitions, based on digital representations of cultural objects arranged in diverse descriptive, narrative or interpretive structures, are an emerging example of a new form of communication between cultural heritage institutions and their publics. These virtual exhibitions become particularly interesting in an era marked by the "dematerialisation of culture", i.e. by a marked shift from viewing heritage as a thing to viewing it as a cultural mode of production, constituted by the interaction between collecting institutions (and their increasingly undermined authoritative voice), objects and publics. In this paper, we examine the way and the extent to which the category of visitors is constituted (and represented) in the user interface rhetorics, the information content and the interactive functions provided by selected examples of recent virtual museum exhibitions; we present a broader view of heritage based on the notion of community memory; identify formal and technological possibilities in further activating multivocality and dialogue, in line with recent museological thinking; and, suggest an analytical framework for further investigation. We conclude that the current generation of virtual exhibitions constitutes a small step towards the emergence of a more dialogic, interactive, living relationship with the past.

Between the 15th of September 2005 and the 15th of November 2005, an exhibit on virtual and Roma archaeology was organized in Rome inside the Trajan's Market Museum. The event, “Building Virtual Rome” (“Immaginare Roma Antica”), was a great opportunity to show, inside a Roman monument, for the first time together, many different projects, applications and installations about VR and Cultural Heritage. The uniqueness of the event was at the same time an occasion to live a new experience, for visitors and for organizers as well, and to face some problematic aspects due, both, mainly by the meeting of high technological projects (some of them still at research level), cultural contents and also archaeological “container”. During the exhibit we tried to observe visitors and make some interviews, with the goal of understanding their expectations at the beginning, their experience during their visit and finally their satisfaction/unsatisfaction, learning, feedback, interaction level during and after the visit. What kind of visitors were attracted by this kind of exhibit? How publicity and communicational messages worked for the event? How visitors could eventually be increased by museums? What kind of expectations people had at the beginning? What kind of problems in using technological devices, such as Joystick, Game pad, haptic device, and so on? What kind of experience? The preliminary results of this analysis are showing that the embodiment and the diverse difficulties to use diverse devices and software depend on many factors and that “communicating” the virtual is not a technological issue, but it is an epistemological question. If the final aims of a virtual project is able to match skills and expectation of the public, virtual reality is capable to increase significantly the ability of learning, creating multiple relationships(“affordances”), not reachable with other tools/devices.