3D virtualization of an underground semi-submerged cave system

Underwater caves represent the most challenging scenario for exploration, mapping and 3D modelling. In such complex environment, unsuitable to humans, highly specialized skills and expensive equipment are normally required. Technological progress and scientific innovation attempt, nowadays, to develop safer and more automatic approaches for the virtualization of these complex and not easily accessible environments, which constitute a unique natural, biological and cultural heritage. This paper presents a pilot study realised for the virtualization of 'Grotta Giusti' (Fig. 1), an underground semi-submerged cave system in central Italy. After an introduction on the virtualization process in the cultural heritage domain and a review of techniques and experiences for the virtualization of underground and submerged environments, the paper will focus on the employed virtualization techniques. In particular, the developed approach to simultaneously survey the semi-submersed areas of the cave relying on a stereo camera system and the virtualization of the virtual cave will be discussed

Design and creation of a virtual world of Petra, Jordan

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis presents the design and creation of a 3D virtual world of Petra, Jordan, based on the digital spatial documentation of this UNESCO World Heritage Site by the Zamani project. Creating digital records of the spatial domain of heritage sites is a well-established practice that employs the technologies of laser scanning, GPS and traditional surveys, aerial and close range photogrammetry, and 360-degree panorama photography to capture spatial data of a site. Processing this data to produce textured 3D models, sections elevations, GISs, and panorama tours to has led to the establishment of the field of virtual heritage. Applications to view this spatial data are considered too specialised to be used by the general public with only trained heritage practitioners being able to use the data. Additionally, data viewing platforms have not been designed to allow for the viewing of combinations of 3D data in an intuitive and engaging manner as currently each spatial data type must be viewed by independent software. Therefore a fully integrated software platform is needed which would allow any interested person, without prior training, easy access to a combination of spatial data, from anywhere in the world. This study seeks to provide a solution to the above requirement by using a game engine to assimilate spatial data of heritage sites in a 3D virtual environment where a virtual visitor is able to interactively engage with combinations of spatial data. The study first begins with an analysis of what virtual heritage applications, in the form of virtual environments, have been created, and the elements that were used in their creation. These elements are then applied to the design and creation of the virtual world of Petra

SCALABLE AR FOR BIM ON TELECOMMUNICATION NETWORK SITES

A growing number of research works, experiments and applications is investigating the potential at the intersection of augmented reality (AR) and the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. Project management, project communication, collaborative design, maintenance and construction progress documentation, construction site safety, and training are some of the cases that can benefit from blending real and virtual views through mobile devices. In recent years, research also highlighted how mixed reality and building information modeling (BIM) could cooperate to provide effective communication between multiple agents and closer interaction between digital information and the building site. Nevertheless, consolidated applications in these fields are still limited, especially when compared to other areas of AR adoption. This paper presents the development of an AR-based mobile app for exploring telecommunications tower sites and interacting with a related BIM database. The project aims to provide easy-to-use tools to maintain both the physical assets and an up-to-date model. We discuss critical issues in developing a scalable and interoperable application, supporting the feasibility study of similar solutions in the AEC sector

Robots for Exploration, Digital Preservation and Visualization of Archeological Sites

Monitoring and conservation of archaeological sites are important activities necessary to prevent damage or to perform restoration on cultural heritage. Standard techniques, like mapping and digitizing, are typically used to document the status of such sites. While these task are normally accomplished manually by humans, this is not possible when dealing with hard-to-access areas. For example, due to the possibility of structural collapses, underground tunnels like catacombs are considered highly unstable environments. Moreover, they are full of radioactive gas radon that limits the presence of people only for few minutes. The progress recently made in the artificial intelligence and robotics field opened new possibilities for mobile robots to be used in locations where humans are not allowed to enter. The ROVINA project aims at developing autonomous mobile robots to make faster, cheaper and safer the monitoring of archaeological sites. ROVINA will be evaluated on the catacombs of Priscilla (in Rome) and S. Gennaro (in Naples)

Virtual Heritage: new technologies for edutainment

Cultural heritage represents an enormous amount of information and knowledge. Accessing this treasure chest allows not only to discover the legacy of physical and intangible attributes of the past but also to provide a better understanding of the present. Museums and cultural institutions have to face the problem of providing access to and communicating these cultural contents to a wide and assorted audience, meeting the expectations and interests of the reference end-users and relying on the most appropriate tools available. Given the large amount of existing tangible and intangible heritage, artistic, historical and cultural contents, what can be done to preserve and properly disseminate their heritage significance? How can these items be disseminated in the proper way to the public, taking into account their enormous heterogeneity? Answering this question requires to deal as well with another aspect of the problem: the evolution of culture, literacy and society during the last decades of 20th century. To reflect such transformations, this period witnessed a shift in the museum’s focus from the aesthetic value of museum artifacts to the historical and artistic information they encompass, and a change into the museums’ role from a mere "container" of cultural objects to a "narrative space" able to explain, describe, and revive the historical material in order to attract and entertain visitors. These developments require creating novel exhibits, able to tell stories about the objects and enabling visitors to construct semantic meanings around them. The objective that museums presently pursue is reflected by the concept of Edutainment, Education + Entertainment. Nowadays, visitors are not satisfied with ‘learning something’, but would rather engage in an ‘experience of learning’, or ‘learning for fun’, being active actors and players in their own cultural experience. As a result, institutions are faced with several new problems, like the need to communicate with people from different age groups and different cultural backgrounds, the change in people attitude due to the massive and unexpected diffusion of technology into everyday life, the need to design the visit by a personal point of view, leading to a high level of customization that allows visitors to shape their path according to their characteristics and interests. In order to cope with these issues, I investigated several approaches. In particular, I focused on Virtual Learning Environments (VLE): real-time interactive virtual environments where visitors can experience a journey through time and space, being immersed into the original historical, cultural and artistic context of the work of arts on display. VLE can strongly help archivists and exhibit designers, allowing to create new interesting and captivating ways to present cultural materials. In this dissertation I will tackle many of the different dimensions related to the creation of a cultural virtual experience. During my research project, the entire pipeline involved into the development and deployment of VLE has been investigated. The approach followed was to analyze in details the main sub-problems to face, in order to better focus on specific issues. Therefore, I first analyzed different approaches to an effective recreation of the historical and cultural context of heritage contents, which is ultimately aimed at an effective transfer of knowledge to the end-users. In particular, I identified the enhancement of the users’ sense of presence in VLE as one of the main tools to reach this objective. Presence is generally expressed as the perception of 'being there', i.e. the subjective belief of users that they are in a certain place, even if they know that the experience is mediated by the computer. Presence is related to the number of senses involved by the VLE and to the quality of the sensorial stimuli. But in a cultural scenario, this is not sufficient as the cultural presence plays a relevant role. Cultural presence is not just a feeling of 'being there' but of being - not only physically, but also socially, culturally - 'there and then'. In other words, the VLE must be able to transfer not only the appearance, but also all the significance and characteristics of the context that makes it a place and both the environment and the context become tools capable of transferring the cultural significance of a historic place. The attention that users pay to the mediated environment is another aspect that contributes to presence. Attention is related to users’ focalization and concentration and to their interests. Thus, in order to improve the involvement and capture the attention of users, I investigated in my work the adoption of narratives and storytelling experiences, which can help people making sense of history and culture, and of gamification approaches, which explore the use of game thinking and game mechanics in cultural contexts, thus engaging users while disseminating cultural contents and, why not?, letting them have fun during this process. Another dimension related to the effectiveness of any VLE is also the quality of the user experience (UX). User interaction, with both the virtual environment and its digital contents, is one of the main elements affecting UX. With respect to this I focused on one of the most recent and promising approaches: the natural interaction, which is based on the idea that persons need to interact with technology in the same way they are used to interact with the real world in everyday life. Then, I focused on the problem of presenting, displaying and communicating contents. VLE represent an ideal presentation layer, being multiplatform hypermedia applications where users are free to interact with the virtual reconstructions by choosing their own visiting path. Cultural items, embedded into the environment, can be accessed by users according to their own curiosity and interests, with the support of narrative structures, which can guide them through the exploration of the virtual spaces, and conceptual maps, which help building meaningful connections between cultural items. Thus, VLE environments can even be seen as visual interfaces to DBs of cultural contents. Users can navigate the VE as if they were browsing the DB contents, exploiting both text-based queries and visual-based queries, provided by the re-contextualization of the objects into their original spaces, whose virtual exploration can provide new insights on specific elements and improve the awareness of relationships between objects in the database. Finally, I have explored the mobile dimension, which became absolutely relevant in the last period. Nowadays, off-the-shelf consumer devices as smartphones and tablets guarantees amazing computing capabilities, support for rich multimedia contents, geo-localization and high network bandwidth. Thus, mobile devices can support users in mobility and detect the user context, thus allowing to develop a plethora of location-based services, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits and cultural or tourist sites according to visitors’ personal interest and curiosity

Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments

The field of shared virtual environments, which also encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model