Multi-Sensory Virtual Environments for Investigating the Past

[EN] A human depends on all five senses: visuals, audio, smell, taste and touch to perceive an environment. It is not only the individual senses, but also their interaction that plays a key role in enabling us to understand the world around us. Virtual archaeology is being increasingly used to investigate the past. Failure to consider all senses in these reconstructions runs the very real danger of misrepresenting ancient environments and how they may have been perceived by our ancestors. This paper describes Real Virtuality: true high-fidelity multi-sensory virtual environments, and shows how such an approach may give historians a more valid means of considering the past.[ES] Los seres humanos dependemos de los cinco sentidos: vista, oído, olfato, gusto y tacto para percibir el medio ambiente. Estos sentidos y la interacción que se produce entre ellos es lo que desempeña un papel clave en la comprensión del mundo que nos rodea. La Arqueología virtual cada vez se utiliza más para investigar el pasado. Por ello si no tomamos en consideración todos los sentidos a la hora de realizar reconstrucciones virtuales corremos el peligro real de tergiversar los entornos antiguos y la forma en la que estos entornos pudieron haber sido percibidos por nuestros antepasados. Este artículo describe la Virtualidad Real: entornos virtuales multi-sensoriales de gran fidelidad, y muestra cómo este enfoque puede proporcionar a los historiadores un medio más válido para estudiar el pasado.Chalmers, A.; Zányi, E. (2010). Multi-Sensory Virtual Environments for Investigating the Past. Virtual Archaeology Review. 1(1):13-16. https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2010.4750OJS131611AGGLETON, J., AND WASKETT, L. (1999): "The ability of odours to serve as state-dependent cues for real-world memories: Can Viking smells aid the recall of Viking experiences? 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Metodologia para a geração de imagens High Dynamic Range em iluminação romana

Comunicação apresentada no International Association for the Scientific Knowledge - InterTIC'07, Porto, 2007.Num futuro muito próximo, o modo como veremos conteúdos num qualquer dispositivo de visualização irá sofrer profundas alterações. A luz captada pelo olho humano num simples passeio pela praia num radioso dia de sol, pode atingir valores de intensidade e cromaticidade verdadeiramente astronómicos. No entanto, grande parte dessa amplitude dinâmica não tem representação possível no modelo RGB, usado praticamente na totalidade dos dispositivos de visualização actuais. High Dynamic Range (HDR) é uma área de investigação que se dedica ao estudo de formas e métodos que visam suprir essa lacuna. Para atingir tal intento, têm sido desenvolvidas novas técnicas para a geração, armazenamento e representação de imagens que consigam preservar a elevada amplitude dinâmica captada pelo Sistema Visual Humano. Neste artigo apresentamos uma metodologia de trabalho que utiliza este novo paradigma de visualização onde o seu potencial é verdadeiramente apropriado, a arqueologia. A Casa dos Repuxos é o espaço mais belo e imponente existente nas ruínas de Conimbriga (Portugal) e que ainda hoje preserva alguns dos frescos e mosaicos originais. O nosso objectivo centra-se na geração de imagens HDR desses frescos e mosaicos iluminados por luminárias desse período, de modo a que a experiência visual seja a mais próxima possível de um habitante daquela mesma casa

Recreating Early Islamic Glass Lamp Lighting

Early Islamic light sources are not simple, static, uniform points, and the fixtures themselves are often combinations of glass, water, fuel and flame. Various physically based renderers such as Radiance are widely used for modeling ancient architectural scenes; however they rarely capture the true ambiance of the environment due to subtle lighting effects. Specifically, these renderers often fail to correctly model complex caustics produced by glass fixtures, water level, and fuel sources. While the original fixtures of the 8th through 10th century Mosque of Córdoba in Spain have not survived, we have applied information gathered from earlier and contemporary sites and artifacts, including those from Byzantium, to assume that it was illuminated by either single jar lamps or supported by polycandela that cast unique downward caustic lighting patterns which helped individuals to navigate and to read. To re-synthesize such lighting, we gathered experimental archaeological data and investigated and validated how various water levels and glass fixture shapes, likely used during early Islamic times, changed the overall light patterns and downward caustics. In this paper, we propose a technique called Caustic Cones, a novel data-driven method to ‘shape’ the light emanating from the lamps to better recreate the downward lighting without resorting to computationally expensive photon mapping renderers. Additionally, we demonstrate on a rendering of the Mosque of Cordoba how our approach greatly benefits archaeologists and architectural historians by providing a more authentic visual simulation of early Islamic glass lamp lighting

The Use of Live Virtual Guides in Educational Applications

—Serious games are becoming increasingly popular in education, science, medicine, religion, engineering, and some other fields. Additionally, serious heritage games, including virtual reconstructions and museums, provide a good environment for a synthesis of serious games and cultural heritage. This may be used for education in the form of edutainment, comprising various techniques, such as storytelling, visual expression of information, interactivity and entertainment [1]. This paper demonstrates a new concept of using live virtual guides in a Flash environment for cultural heritage virtual reconstruction. A pilot user study compares another approach using the X3D environment, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of our concept. The introduced results can be easily adopted for serious games development

Una perspectiva sobre el modelado procedural basado en análisis estructurales

[EN] With the rise of available computing capabilities, structural analysis has recently become a key tool for building assessment usually managed by art historians, curators, and other specialist related to the study and preservation of ancient buildings. On the other hand, the flourishing field of procedural modeling has provided some exciting breakthroughs for the recreation of lost buildings and urban structures. However, there is a surprising lack of literature to enable the production of procedural-based buildings taking into account structural analysis, which has proven to be a crucial element for the recreation of faithful masonry structures. In order to perform an in-depth study of the advances in this type of analysis for cultural heritage buildings, we performed a study focused on procedural modeling that make use of structural analysis methods, especially in its application to historic masonry buildings such as churches and cathedrals. Moreover, with the aim of improving the knowledge about structural analysis of procedurally-recreated historical buildings, we have taken a geometric structure, added a set of procedural walls structured in masonry bricks, and studied its behavior in a generic, freely-available simulation tool, thus showing the feasibility of its analysis with non-specialized tools. This not only has allowed us to understand and learn how the different parameter values of a masonry structure can affect the results of the simulation, but also has proven that this kind of simulations can be easily integrated in an off-the-shelf procedural modeling tool, enabling this kind of analysis for a wide variety of historical studies, or restoration and preservation actions.[ES] Con el creciente aumento de las capacidades computacionales, el análisis estructural se ha convertido en una herramienta clave para la evaluación del estudio y conservación de edificios antiguos por parte de los historiadores del arte, curadores y otros especialistas. Por otro lado, el floreciente campo del modelado procedural ha proporcionado avances interesantes para la reconstrucción de edificios y estructuras urbanas no accesibles. Sin embargo, hay una sorprendente falta de métodos que permiten la generación deedificios procedurales, teniendo en cuenta el análisis estructural, los cuales handemostrado ser un elemento crucial para la concepciónde estructuras de mampostería. Con el fin de realizar un estudio en profundidad de los avances en este tipo de análisis para edificios del patrimonio cultural, se realizó un estudio centrado en elroldelmodelado proceduralque realizanmétodos de análisis estructural, especialmente en su aplicación a los edificios históricos de albañilería, tales como iglesias y catedrales. Por otra parte, con el objetivo de mejorar el conocimiento sobre el análisis estructural de los edificios históricos concebidosproceduralmente, hemos tomado una estructura geométrica de un atrículo, añadidoun conjunto de paredesproceduralesestructuradasen ladrillos, y estudiado su comportamiento conuna herramienta de simulación de pública disponibilidad.Con esto sedemuestra la viabilidad de su análisis con herramientas no especializadas. Esto no sólo nos ha permitido entender y aprender cómo los diferentes valores de los parámetros de una estructura de mampostería pueden afectar los resultados de la simulación, sino tambiénque este tipo de simulaciones se puede integrar fácilmente en una herramienta de modelado proceduralal alcance de todo público, lo que permite acercar este tipo de análisis a una amplia variedad de estudios históricos o acciones de restauración y conservación.This work was partially funded by the TIN2014-52211-C2-2-R project from Ministerio de Economia y Competividad, Spain.Fita, JL.; Besuievsky, G.; Patow, G. (2017). A perspective on procedural modeling based on structural analysis. Virtual Archaeology Review. 8(16):44-50. https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2017.5765SWORD445081

Virtually Being Lenin Enhances Presence and Engagement in a Scene From the Russian Revolution

Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely applied to cultural heritage such as the reconstruction of ancient sites and artifacts. It has hardly been applied to the reprise of specific important moments in history. On the other hand immersive journalism does attempt to recreate current events in VR, but such applications typically give the viewer a disembodied non-participatory role in the scene of interest. Here we show how VR was used to reconstruct a specific historical event, where a famous photograph was brought to life, showing Lenin, the leader of the 1917 October Russian Revolution, giving a speech to Red Army recruits in Moscow 1920. We carried out a between groups experimental study with three conditions: Embodied—where the participant was first embodied as Lenin and then later in the audience watching Lenin; Included—where the participant was not embodied as Lenin but was embodied as part of the audience; and Observing—where the participant mainly viewed the scene from a disembodied third person point of view. Twenty participants were assigned to each of the three conditions in a between-groups design. We found that the level of presence was greatest in the Embodied and Included conditions, and that participants were least likely to later follow up information about the Russian Revolution in the Observing condition. Our conclusion is that if the VR setup allows for a period of embodiment as a character in the scenario then this should be employed in order to maximize the chance of participant presence and engagement with the story