ARCO Technology

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Museum Interactive Experiences through a 3D Reconstruction of the Church of Santa Chiara

This paper presents a unique museum interactive experience that provides a ‘digital repatriation’ of the Church of Santa Chiara located in Florence, Italy (deconsecrated in 1808) with its chapel and altars that are located in the recently opened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. This digital repatriation, for the enjoyment of the cultural heritage tourist, is achieved through a 3D reconstruction of the church, chapel and altars embedded in a touch screen interactive with their associated digital heritage content based around the themes of People involved in the church during the renaissance period, Different Views of the church, and related Altarpiece and Churches from the Florentine renaissance period. The main interactive is based on a 3D reconstruction and photo-realistic rendering available to visitors at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Medieval and Renaissance Galleries; in addition a Wed 3D version (or virtual museum) is also available online for the digital tourist

An added dimension for virtual museums

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ARCO Technology

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An added dimension for virtual museums

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Augmented Reality techniques for museum environments

Research into indoor exhibition systems associated with the use of augmented reality technologies is very limited. In this paper, we propose an architecture that is capable of generating accurate 3D models using as input only a few photographs and then merging real and virtual information in a seamless way. We have experimentally applied two simple but effective ways of visualising incomplete or broken real objects as they were in their original state by superimposing their missing parts. To enhance the immersion and realism of the simulated environment, the system allows augmented exhibition of other modes of multimedia content such as textual and pictorial information within the 3D world space. Finally, human-computer interaction techniques are implemented to allow users to naturally manipulate the augmented scenarios

ARCO EU Project

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Fake news: a technological approach to proving the origins of content, using blockchains

In this paper, we introduce a prototype of an innovative technology for proving the origins of captured digital media. In an era of fake news, when someone shows us a video or picture of some event, how can we trust its authenticity? It seems the public no longer believe that traditional media is a reliable reference of fact, perhaps due, in part, to the onset of many diverse sources of conflicting information, via social media. Indeed, the issue of ‘fake’ reached a crescendo during the 2016 US Presidential Election, when the winner, Donald Trump, claimed that the New York Times was trying to discredit him by pushing disinformation. Current research into overcoming the problem of fake news does not focus on establishing the ownership of media resources used in such stories - the blockchain-based application introduced in this article is technology that is capable of indicating the authenticity of digital media. Put simply; by using the trust mechanisms of blockchain technology, the tool can show, beyond doubt, the provenance of any source of digital media, including images used out of context in attempts to mislead. Although the application is an early prototype and its capability to find fake resources is Peer Review Only/Not for Distributionsomewhat limited, we outline future improvements that would overcome such limitations. Furthermore, we believe our application (and its use of blockchain technology and standardised metadata), introduces a novel approach to overcoming falsities in news reporting and the provenance of media resources used therein. However, while our application has the potential to be able to verify the originality of media resources, we believe technology is only capable of providing a partial solution to fake news. That is because it is incapable of proving the authenticity of a news story as a whole. We believe that takes human skills

ARCO Augmented Reality Interface

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Development of service oriented mobile AR applications for museum learning activities

This paper presents the implementation of a Service Oriented Mobile AR Architecture focused on museum learning activities. The service-orientated architecture presented is a collaboration between a mobile AR platform and a web service framework that consumes third party service APIs or linked open data from participating museum collections. The architecture and associated codebase is used to implement virtual museum exhibitions based around mobile AR applications. It is also based on an open platform where the web service serves to move business logic that performs interoperability tasks including metadata, multimedia and 3D content acquisition and utilization to the front end. As such, museum content requests are implemented through APIs calls such as those provided by the Victoria and Albert Museum, Europeana, SierraLeoneHeritage, and other participating museum APIs. Further, the architecture can consume other third party APIs such as Google Maps. This paper describes the architecture and codebase that is now open source and can be used for developing a virtual museum exhibition based on the service-orientation — the codebase can be accessed on GitHub