Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Building with Drones: Accurate 3D Facade Reconstruction using MAVs

Automatic reconstruction of 3D models from images using multi-view Structure-from-Motion methods has been one of the most fruitful outcomes of computer vision. These advances combined with the growing popularity of Micro Aerial Vehicles as an autonomous imaging platform, have made 3D vision tools ubiquitous for large number of Architecture, Engineering and Construction applications among audiences, mostly unskilled in computer vision. However, to obtain high-resolution and accurate reconstructions from a large-scale object using SfM, there are many critical constraints on the quality of image data, which often become sources of inaccuracy as the current 3D reconstruction pipelines do not facilitate the users to determine the fidelity of input data during the image acquisition. In this paper, we present and advocate a closed-loop interactive approach that performs incremental reconstruction in real-time and gives users an online feedback about the quality parameters like Ground Sampling Distance (GSD), image redundancy, etc on a surface mesh. We also propose a novel multi-scale camera network design to prevent scene drift caused by incremental map building, and release the first multi-scale image sequence dataset as a benchmark. Further, we evaluate our system on real outdoor scenes, and show that our interactive pipeline combined with a multi-scale camera network approach provides compelling accuracy in multi-view reconstruction tasks when compared against the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 8 Pages, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '15), Seattle, WA, US

Serious Games in Cultural Heritage

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Enabling Self-aware Smart Buildings by Augmented Reality

Conventional HVAC control systems are usually incognizant of the physical structures and materials of buildings. These systems merely follow pre-set HVAC control logic based on abstract building thermal response models, which are rough approximations to true physical models, ignoring dynamic spatial variations in built environments. To enable more accurate and responsive HVAC control, this paper introduces the notion of "self-aware" smart buildings, such that buildings are able to explicitly construct physical models of themselves (e.g., incorporating building structures and materials, and thermal flow dynamics). The question is how to enable self-aware buildings that automatically acquire dynamic knowledge of themselves. This paper presents a novel approach using "augmented reality". The extensive user-environment interactions in augmented reality not only can provide intuitive user interfaces for building systems, but also can capture the physical structures and possibly materials of buildings accurately to enable real-time building simulation and control. This paper presents a building system prototype incorporating augmented reality, and discusses its applications.Comment: This paper appears in ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy), 201

Data-Driven Shape Analysis and Processing

Data-driven methods play an increasingly important role in discovering geometric, structural, and semantic relationships between 3D shapes in collections, and applying this analysis to support intelligent modeling, editing, and visualization of geometric data. In contrast to traditional approaches, a key feature of data-driven approaches is that they aggregate information from a collection of shapes to improve the analysis and processing of individual shapes. In addition, they are able to learn models that reason about properties and relationships of shapes without relying on hard-coded rules or explicitly programmed instructions. We provide an overview of the main concepts and components of these techniques, and discuss their application to shape classification, segmentation, matching, reconstruction, modeling and exploration, as well as scene analysis and synthesis, through reviewing the literature and relating the existing works with both qualitative and numerical comparisons. We conclude our report with ideas that can inspire future research in data-driven shape analysis and processing.Comment: 10 pages, 19 figure

The Need to Support of Data Flow Graph Visualization of Forensic Lucid Programs, Forensic Evidence, and their Evaluation by GIPSY

Lucid programs are data-flow programs and can be visually represented as data flow graphs (DFGs) and composed visually. Forensic Lucid, a Lucid dialect, is a language to specify and reason about cyberforensic cases. It includes the encoding of the evidence (representing the context of evaluation) and the crime scene modeling in order to validate claims against the model and perform event reconstruction, potentially within large swaths of digital evidence. To aid investigators to model the scene and evaluate it, instead of typing a Forensic Lucid program, we propose to expand the design and implementation of the Lucid DFG programming onto Forensic Lucid case modeling and specification to enhance the usability of the language and the system and its behavior. We briefly discuss the related work on visual programming an DFG modeling in an attempt to define and select one approach or a composition of approaches for Forensic Lucid based on various criteria such as previous implementation, wide use, formal backing in terms of semantics and translation. In the end, we solicit the readers' constructive, opinions, feedback, comments, and recommendations within the context of this short discussion.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, index; extended abstract presented at VizSec'10 at http://www.vizsec2010.org/posters ; short paper accepted at PST'1