Smart Photos

Recent technological leaps have been a great catalyst for changing how people interact with the world around us. Specifically, the field of Augmented Reality has led to many software and hardware advances that have formed a digital intermediary between humans and their environment. As of now, Augmented Reality is available to the select few with the means of obtaining Google Glass, Oculus Rifts, and other relatively expensive platforms. Be that as it may, the tech industry\u27s current goal has been integration of this technology into the public\u27s smartphones and everyday devices. One inhibitor of this goal is the difficulty of finding an Augmented Reality application whose usage could satisfy an everyday need or attraction. Augmented reality presents our world in a unique perspective that can be found nowhere else in the natural world. However, visual impact is weak without substance or meaning. The best technology is invisible, and what makes a good product is its ability to fill a void in a person\u27s life. The most important researchers in this field are those who have been augmenting the tasks that most would consider mundane, such as overlaying nutritional information directly onto a meal [4]. In the same vein, we hope to incorporate Augmented Reality into everyday life by unlocking the full potential of a technology often believed to have already have reached its peak. The humble photograph, a classic invention and unwavering enhancement to the human experience, captures moments in space and time and compresses them into a single permanent state. These two-dimensional assortments of pixels give us a physical representation of the memories we form in specific periods of our lives. We believe this representation can be further enhanced in what we like to call a Smart Photo. The idea behind a Smart Photo is to unlock the full potential in the way that people can interact with photographs. This same notion is explored in the field of Virtual Reality with inventions such as 3D movies, which provide a special appeal that ordinary 2D films cannot. The 3D technology places the viewer inside the film\u27s environment. We intend to marry this seemingly mutually exclusive dichotomy by processing 2D photos alongside their 3D counterparts

Augmented Reality Birdwatching in Mindo

The project reported in this dissertation presents the development of an Android mobile application to be used for birdwatching in Mindo - Ecuador. The application has as target audience tourists and as main goal to share information about the species that inhabit the aforementioned place to improve tourist experience; it provides routes to follow with points of interest in which the users can find bird species. In addition to this, the application provides scientific information and highlights the most important characteristics of bird species, information about the threats that may be exposing these species to extinction and multimedia content like images, videos and sounds of those species. As a distinctive feature, this application uses augmented reality to enhance birdwatching experience; it allows the user to interact in a different way with nature and offers the opportunity to perceive virtual 3D models of some birds and take photos of it to share on social networks or simply to save on the device. To manage all the content of the application, a web-based backoffice was also developed, to add, edit or remove routes, spots and species including their information, images, videos and sounds. The augmented reality, together with the user-friendly interface make the application very interactive and attractive to the user, likewise, the backoffice allows a simple administration of the content

Context-Based Cultural Visits

Over the last two decades, there have been tremendous advances in mobile technologies, which have increased the interest in studying and developing mobile augmented reality systems, especially in the field of Cultural Heritage. Nowadays, people rely even more on smartphones, for example, when visiting a new city to search for information about monuments and landmarks, and the visitor expects precise and tailored information to his needs. Therefore, researchers started to investigate innovative approaches for presenting and suggesting digital content related to cultural and historical places around the city, incorporating contextual information about the visitor and his needs. This document presents a novel mobile augmented reality application, NearHeritage, that was developed within the scope of the master's thesis on Electrical and Computers Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of Porto University (FEUP), in collaboration with INESC TEC. The research carried out was focused on the importance of utilising modern technologies to assist the visitors in finding and exploring Cultural Heritage. In this way, it is provided not only the nearby points-of-interest of a city but also detailed information about each POI. The solution presented uses built-in sensors and hardware of Android devices and takes advantage of various APIs (Foursquare API, Google Maps API and IntelContextSensing) to retrieve information about the landmarks and the visitor context. Also, these are crucial hardware components for implementing the full potential of augmented reality tools to create innovative contents that increase the overall user experience. All the experiments were conducted in Porto, Portugal, and the final results showcase that the concept of a MAR application can improve the user experience in discovering and learning more about Cultural Heritage around the world, creating an interactive, enjoyable and unforgettable adventure

In Darwin’s Garden: an evolutionary exploration of augmented reality in practice

This book is part of the Springer Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series and will be published under Springer's Open Access policy.This chapter discusses the rapid developments in augmented reality and mixed reality technologies, from a practitioner’s perspective of making the augmented reality sculptural work In Darwin’s Garden. From its conception in 2012, to its exhibition at Carbon Meets Silicon II in 2017, the advances in augmented reality technology led to an interplay between the goal of the creators and the technological realisation of that vision. The art, design and technology involved, generated a reactive process that was mired in external influences as the accessibility to augmented reality became commercially valuable and subsequently restricted. This chapter will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand more about the possibilities, technologies and processes involved in realising mixed reality practice and about the commercial culture that supports it

Spatially Localised Immersive Contemporary and Historic Photo Presentation on Mobile Devices in Augmented Reality

These days, taking a photo is the most common way of capturing a moment. Some of these photos captured in the moment are never to be seen again. Others are almost immediately shared with the world. Yet, the context of the captured moment can only be shared to a limited extent. The continuous improvement of mobile devices has not only led to higher resolution cameras and, thus, visually more appealing pictures but also to a broader and more precise range of accompanying sensor metadata. Positional and bearing information can provide context for photos and is thus an integral aspect of the captured moment. However, it is commonly only used to sort photos by time and possibly group by place. Such more precise sensor metadata, combined with the increased computing power of mobile devices, can enable more and more powerful Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities, especially for communicating the context of a captured photo. Users can thereby witness the captured moment in its real location and also experience its spatial contextualization. With the help of a suitable data augmentation, such context-preserving presentation can be extended even to non-digitally born content, including historical images. This offers new immersive ways to experience the cultural history of one's current location. In this paper, we present an approach for location-based image presentation in AR on mobile devices. With this approach, users can experience captured moments in their physical context. We demonstrate the power of this approach based on a prototype implementation and evaluate it in a user study

Collaborative and Multi-Modal Mixed Reality for Enhancing Cultural Learning in Virtual Heritage

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3D SCENE RECONSTRUCTION SYSTEM BASED ON A MOBILE DEVICE

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications can take advantage of efficient digitalization of real objects as reconstructed elements can allow users a better connection between real and virtual worlds than using pre-set 3D CAD models. Technology advances contribute to the spread of AR and VR technologies, which are always more diffuse and popular. On the other hand, the design and implementation of virtual and extended worlds is still an open problem; affordable and robust solutions to support 3D object digitalization is still missing. This work proposes a reconstruction system that allows users to receive a 3D CAD model starting from a single image of the object to be digitalized and reconstructed. A smartphone can be used to take a photo of the object under analysis and a remote server performs the reconstruction process by exploiting a pipeline of three Deep Learning methods. Accuracy and robustness of the system have been assessed by several experiments and the main outcomes show how the proposed solution has a comparable accuracy (chamfer distance) with the state-of-the-art methods for 3D object reconstruction

Reanimating cultural heritage through digital technologies

Digital technologies are becoming extremely important for web-based cultural heritage applications. This thesis presents novel digital technology solutions to 'access and interact' with digital heritage objects and collections. These innovative solutions utilize service orientation (web services), workflows, and social networking and Web 2.0 mashup technologies to innovate the creation, interpretation and use of collections dispersed in a global museumscape, where community participation is achieved through social networking. These solutions are embedded in a novel concept called Digital Library Services for Playing with Shared Heritage (DISPLAYS). DISPLAYS is concerned with creating tools and services to implement a digital library system, which allows the heritage community and museum professionals alike to create, interpret and use digital heritage content in visualization and interaction environments using web technologies based on social networking. In particular, this thesis presents a specific implementation of DISPLAYS called the Reanimating Cultural Heritage system, which is modelled on the five main functionalities or services defined in the DISPLAYS architecture, content creation, archival, exposition, presentation and interaction, for handling digital heritage objects. The main focus of this thesis is the design of the Reanimating Cultural Heritage system's social networking functionality that provides an innovative solution for integrating community access and interaction with the Sierra Leone digital heritage repository composed of collections from the British Museum, Glasgow Museums and Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. The novel use of Web 2.0 mashups in this digital heritage repository also allows the seamless integration of these museum collections to be merged with user or community generated content, while preserving the quality of museum collections data. Finally, this thesis tests and evaluates the usability of the Reanimating Cultural Heritage social networking system, in particular the suitability of the digital technology solution deployed. Testing is performed with a user group composed of several users, and the results obtained are presented

Technology in Museums: New Tools for Traditional Goals

This thesis has examined the ways that museums might theoretically incorporate technology in addition to current technologies employed in museums. Analysis has been done on the ways that technology can be useful in engaging visitors who might come to museums alone, in a group, or as part school fieldtrips. The various uses of social-media are discussed, including social-media strategy recommendations for museums. Museum mobile applications are investigated and features for such applications have been analyzed for how they might benefit both museums and visitorsMaster of ArtsArts AdministrationUniversity of Michigan-Flinthttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145732/1/Bellinger2018.pdfDescription of Bellinger2018.pdf : Thesi

VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage, VRTCH 2018, held in Brasov, Romania in May 2018. The 13 revised full papers along with the 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers of this volume are organized in topical sections on data acquisition and modelling, visualization methods / audio, sensors and actuators, data management, restoration and digitization, cultural tourism