A framework study on the use of immersive XR technologies in the cultural heritage domain

Most cultural promotion and dissemination are nowadays performed through the digitization of heritage sites and museums, a necessary requirement to meet the new needs of the public. Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Virtual Reality (VR) have the potential to improve the experience quality and educational effect of these sites by stimulating users’ senses in a more natural and vivid way. In this respect, head-mounted display (HMD) devices allow visitors to enhance the experience of cultural sites by digitizing information and integrating additional virtual cues about cultural artifacts, resulting in a more immersive experience that engages the visitor both physically and emotionally. This study contributes to the development and incorporation of AR, MR, and VR applications in the cultural heritage domain by providing an overview of relevant studies utilizing fully immersive systems, such as headsets and CAVE systems, emphasizing the advantages that they bring when compared to handheld devices. We propose a framework study to identify the key features of headset-based Extended Reality (XR) technologies used in the cultural heritage domain that boost immersion, sense of presence, and agency. Furthermore, we highlight core characteristics that favor the adoption of these systems over more traditional solutions (e.g., handheld devices), as well as unsolved issues that must be addressed to improve the guests’ experience and the appreciation of the cultural heritage. An extensive search of Google Scholar, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and Wiley Online Library databases was conducted, including papers published from January 2018 to September 2022. To improve review reporting, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were used. Sixty-five papers met the inclusion criteria and were classified depending on the study’s purpose: education, entertainment, edutainment, touristic guidance systems, accessibility, visitor profiling, and management. Immersive cultural heritage systems allow visitors to feel completely immersed and present in the virtual environment, providing a stimulating and educational cultural experience that can improve the quality and learning purposes of cultural visits. Nonetheless, the analyzed studies revealed some limitations that must be faced to give a further impulse to the adoption of these technologies in the cultural heritage domain

The world on a plate: the impact of photography on travel imagery and its dissemination in Britain, 1839-1888

This thesis explores how early photography contributed to the visual understanding of the world in the nineteenth century. It draws extensively on the collection of nineteenth-century photographic albums at the National Maritime Museum, London. These albums, compiled or purchased by officers in the Royal Navy, offer an extensive view of how the world was perceived by both the officers who collected photographs during overseas service and the photographers who competed to supply them. Chapter 1 considers two personal photographic albums compiled by naval officers Frederick North and Tynte F. Hammill. Through these it reveals the agency of the collector as a curator of their own world picture, and introduces wider currents visible across the archive. Chapter 2 explores the impact of photography on the visual representation of the Crimean War and the competitive market for travel imagery in Britain. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the work of photographer Felice Beato, the studio albums he created in Japan and Korea, and the role of the British navy and military in Asia – a significant early market for overseas photography. Chapter 3 looks at Beato’s Views and Costumes albums (c. 1868) and problematizes previous readings, arguing for a more nuanced and cross-cultural approach. This chapter also offers evidence to support a realignment (caused by previous misbinding) of the V&A Views album. Chapter 4 employs Beato’s Korean album (1871) as a case study and reveals pictorial slippage across albums previously believed to be homogenous. Chapter 5 explores the secondary use of overseas photographs as engravings in the British press and publications. The thesis concludes that nineteenth-century photographic albums compiled by naval officers while on overseas service offer visual evidence that vision underwent a profound shift during this time and that looking at the world became subjective, fragmentary and contingent

Futureportrait: a constructed glimpse of tomorrow

Future Portrait looks at the future. Using portraiture as a window it will examine the aesthetics, the technologies and the people of the future. Portraiture is an ideal vehicle for this exploration because it allows us an individual and personal connection with the sitters, giving us insight into their world and existence. Portraiture’s many diverse styles (formal, street, environmental) are considered as portals to ‘what may be’. My main goal for this project has been to create a body of work that visually explores the ideas, concepts and thoughts explored in imagery from the realm of Japanese art and culture, the West’s perception of Japan, and both Eastern and Western science fiction visions of futuristic dystopia. Constructed carefully in studio spaces and highly lit locations, my photographs become ‘home’ to a cast of actors and models who act out a series of stories created from story boards. Images made in contemporary Japan and blended with studio constructions to build a new vision. Through these elaborate tableaux photographs, I am interested in exploring a my vision of a possible future. From a man and his manga styled “tamagotchi” girlfriend driving in a car, to a typical street scene of a Blade Runner inspired noodle bar or scene from a suburban train, Future Portrait aims to give a glimpse in to tomorrow

An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion

Text-to-image models offer unprecedented freedom to guide creation through natural language. Yet, it is unclear how such freedom can be exercised to generate images of specific unique concepts, modify their appearance, or compose them in new roles and novel scenes. In other words, we ask: how can we use language-guided models to turn our cat into a painting, or imagine a new product based on our favorite toy? Here we present a simple approach that allows such creative freedom. Using only 3-5 images of a user-provided concept, like an object or a style, we learn to represent it through new "words" in the embedding space of a frozen text-to-image model. These "words" can be composed into natural language sentences, guiding personalized creation in an intuitive way. Notably, we find evidence that a single word embedding is sufficient for capturing unique and varied concepts. We compare our approach to a wide range of baselines, and demonstrate that it can more faithfully portray the concepts across a range of applications and tasks. Our code, data and new words will be available at: https://textual-inversion.github.ioComment: Project page: https://textual-inversion.github.i

Images of Roman Imperial denarii : a curated data set for the evaluation of computer vision algorithms applied to ancient numismatics, and an overview of challenges in the field

Automatic ancient Roman coin analysis only recently emerged as a topic of computer science research. Nevertheless, owing to its ever-increasing popularity, the field is already reaching a certain degree of maturity, as witnessed by a substantial publication output in the last decade. At the same time, it is becoming evident that research progress is being limited by a somewhat veering direction of effort and the lack of a coherent framework which facilitates the acquisition and dissemination of robust, repeatable, and rigorous evidence. Thus, in the present article, we seek to address several associated challenges. To start with, (i) we provide a first overview and discussion of different challenges in the field, some of which have been scarcely investigated to date, and others which have hitherto been unrecognized and unaddressed. Secondly, (ii) we introduce the first data set, carefully curated and collected for the purpose of facilitating methodological evaluation of algorithms and, specifically, the effects of coin preservation grades on the performance of automatic methods. Indeed, until now, only one published work at all recognized the need for this kind of analysis, which, to any numismatist, would be a trivially obvious fact. We also discuss a wide range of considerations which had to be taken into account in collecting this corpus, explain our decisions, and describe its content in detail. Briefly, the data set comprises 100 different coin issues, all with multiple examples in Fine, Very Fine, and Extremely Fine conditions, giving a total of over 650 different specimens. These correspond to 44 issuing authorities and span the time period of approximately 300 years (from 27 BC until 244 AD). In summary, the present article should be an invaluable resource to researchers in the field, and we encourage the community to adopt the collected corpus, freely available for research purposes, as a standard evaluation benchmark.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe