Lirolem: A virtual studio/Institutional Repository for the University of Lincoln

Gives an account of the Lirolem project at the University of Lincoln which was to build a repository capable of handling multimedia material as well as providing a repository for the University's research output

LightGuider: Guiding Interactive Lighting Design using Suggestions, Provenance, and Quality Visualization

LightGuider is a novel guidance-based approach to interactive lighting design, which typically consists of interleaved 3D modeling operations and light transport simulations. Rather than having designers use a trial-and-error approach to match their illumination constraints and aesthetic goals, LightGuider supports the process by simulating potential next modeling steps that can deliver the most significant improvements. LightGuider takes predefined quality criteria and the current focus of the designer into account to visualize suggestions for lighting-design improvements via a specialized provenance tree. This provenance tree integrates snapshot visualizations of how well a design meets the given quality criteria weighted by the designer's preferences. This integration facilitates the analysis of quality improvements over the course of a modeling workflow as well as the comparison of alternative design solutions. We evaluate our approach with three lighting designers to illustrate its usefulness

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

Towards Zero-Waste Furniture Design

In traditional design, shapes are first conceived, and then fabricated. While this decoupling simplifies the design process, it can result in inefficient material usage, especially where off-cut pieces are hard to reuse. The designer, in absence of explicit feedback on material usage remains helpless to effectively adapt the design -- even though design variabilities exist. In this paper, we investigate {\em waste minimizing furniture design} wherein based on the current design, the user is presented with design variations that result in more effective usage of materials. Technically, we dynamically analyze material space layout to determine {\em which} parts to change and {\em how}, while maintaining original design intent specified in the form of design constraints. We evaluate the approach on simple and complex furniture design scenarios, and demonstrate effective material usage that is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without computational support

The Story of the Markham Car Collection: A Cross-Platform Panoramic Tour of Contested Heritage

In this article, we share our experiences of using digital technologies and various media to present historical narratives of a museum object collection aiming to provide an engaging experience on multiple platforms. Based on P. Joseph’s article, Dawson presented multiple interpretations and historical views of the Markham car collection across various platforms using multimedia resources. Through her creative production, she explored how to use cylindrical panoramas and rich media to offer new ways of telling the controversial story of the contested heritage of a museum’s veteran and vintage car collection. The production’s usability was investigated involving five experts before it was published online and the general users’ experience was investigated. In this article, we present an important component of findings which indicates that virtual panorama tours featuring multimedia elements could be successful in attracting new audiences and that using this type of storytelling technique can be effective in the museum sector. The storyteller panorama tour presented here may stimulate GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) professionals to think of new approaches, implement new strategies or services to engage their audiences more effectively. The research may ameliorate the education of future professionals as well

adVantage -- Seeing the Universe: How Virtual Reality can Further Augment a Three-Dimensional Model of a Star-Planet-Satellite System for Educational Gain in Undergraduate Astronomy Education

This thesis introduces the “adVantage – Seeing the Universe” system, a learning environment designed to augment introductory undergraduate astronomy education. The goal of the adVantage project is to show how an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment can be used effectively to model the relative sizes and distances between objects in space. To this end, adVantage leverages the benefits of three-dimensional models by letting users observe astronomical phenomena from multiple locations. The system uses pre-set vantage points to structure students’ progress through a “mission” designed to improve their understanding of scale. With this first mission, adVantage demonstrates the potential benefits of representing larger distances as multiples of smaller steps of a constant and observable size to convey relative distance in space, and of judging relative size by making observations at various vantage points a constant distance away from each other. Using an HTC Vive headset and hand-controllers, students exploring in adVantage will be able to observe the relative sizes and orbital movements of the subjects of the system: e.g., the exoplanet WASP-12b, its Sun-like star, WASP-12, and imagined satellites constructed to resemble the Earth and its Moon. In the first mission, users investigate the Earth’s average orbital radius around the Sun with the average orbital radius of WASP-12b around WASP-12 as a yardstick

A Checklist to Publish Collections as Data in GLAM Institutions

Large-scale digitization in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) created the conditions for providing access to collections as data. It opened new opportunities to explore, use and reuse digital collections. Strong proponents of collections as data are the Innovation Labs which provided numerous examples of publishing datasets under open licenses in order to reuse digital content in novel and creative ways. Within the current transition to the emerging data spaces, clouds for cultural heritage and open science, the need to identify practices which support more GLAM institutions to offer datasets becomes a priority, especially within the smaller and medium-sized institutions. This paper answers the need to support GLAM institutions in facilitating the transition into publishing their digital content and to introduce collections as data services; this will also help their future efficient contribution to data spaces and cultural heritage clouds. It offers a checklist that can be used for both creating and evaluating digital collections suitable for computational use. The main contributions of this paper are i) a methodology for devising a checklist to create and assess digital collections for computational use; ii) a checklist to create and assess digital collections suitable for use with computational methods; iii) the assessment of the checklist against the practice of institutions innovating in the Collections as data field; and iv) the results obtained after the application and recommendations for the use of the checklist in GLAM institutions

Generating 3D thumbnails for 3D contents

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2010.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2010.Includes bibliographical references leaves 74-80.Creating effective thumbnails is a challenging task because finding important features and preserving the quality of the content is difficult. Additionally, as the popularity of 3D technologies is increasing, the usage area of 3D contents and the 3D content databases are expanding. However, for these contents, 2D thumbnails are insufficient since the current methods for generating them do not maintain the important and recognizable features of the content and give the idea of the content. In this thesis, we introduce a new thumbnail format, 3D thumbnail that helps users to understand the content of the 3D graphical scene or 3D video + depth by preserving the recognizable features and qualities. For creating 3D thumbnails, we developed a framework that generates 3D thumbnails for different 3D contents in order to create meaningful and qualified thumbnails. Thus, the system selects the best viewpoint in order to capture the scene with a high amount of detail for 3D graphical scenes. On the other hand, this process is different for 3D videos. In this case, by a saliency-depth based approach, we find the important objects on the selected frame of the 3D video and preserve them. Finally, after some steps such as placement, 3D rendering etc., the resulting thumbnails give more glorified information about the content. Finally, several experiments are presented which show that our proposed 3D thumbnail format is statistically (p <0.05 ) better than 2D thumbnails.Yiğit, YelizM.S

Libraries and Museums: Fostering GLAM Collaboration at the University of Iowa

This report outlines the findings of the University of Iowa (UI) Executive Leadership Academy – Higher Education (ELA) project team GLAM1 during the 2017-18 academic year. Team GLAM was charged by the UI Stanley Museum of Art Interim Chair James Leach and UI Librarian John Culshaw with investigating the present state and potential of new collaboration between the Stanley Museum and those UI Libraries with the greatest focus on the visual arts. This report provides the team’s findings, as well as its recommendations for forging new relationships and leveraging the strengths of both types of institution to transform them into places where bold experiments will generate new ideas for research, teaching, and service. Based on our discussions, research, site visits, interviews, and ideation sessions held between October 2017 and April 2018, team GLAM recommends implementation of the following five broad collaborative practices. Full details around these recommendations can be found on pps. 18-20 in the final report: Establish a formal GLAM committee that is empowered to shape an environment on campus where GLAM can flourish and be sustained. Increase opportunities for collaborations across staff positions. Reward and recognize staff and faculty who actively and productively collaborate in GLAM research, teaching, and service activities. Identify and proactively pursue grants and other funding opportunities that support collaborative activities across GLAM. Invest in digitization and joint technologies related to accessibility and discovery. GLAM on the UI campus faces enormous budgetary, technology, and other environmental challenges that are most effectively addressed by broader collaboration across campus, beyond traditional organizational structures and disciplines. By strengthening current collaborations while seeking new ones across campus, the Stanley Museum of Art and the UI Libraries can leverage the strengths of both entities and advance their missions in service of UI’s broader strategic goals