'Breaking the glass': preserving social history in virtual environments

New media technologies play an important role in the evolution of our society. Traditional museums and heritage sites have evolved from the ‘cabinets of curiosity’ that focused mainly on the authority of the voice organising content, to the places that offer interactivity as a means to experience historical and cultural events of the past. They attempt to break down the division between visitors and historical artefacts, employing modern technologies that allow the audience to perceive a range of perspectives of the historical event. In this paper, we discuss virtual reconstruction and interactive storytelling techniques as a research methodology and educational and presentation practices for cultural heritage sites. We present the Narrating the Past project as a case study, in order to illustrate recent changes in the preservation of social history and guided tourist trails that aim to make the visitor’s experience more than just an architectural walk through

A semantic and language-based representation of an environmental scene

The modeling of a landscape environment is a cognitive activity that requires appropriate spatial representations. The research presented in this paper introduces a structural and semantic categorization of a landscape view based on panoramic photographs that act as a substitute of a given natural environment. Verbal descriptions of a landscape scene provide themodeling input of our approach. This structure-based model identifies the spatial, relational, and semantic constructs that emerge from these descriptions. Concepts in the environment are qualified according to a semantic classification, their proximity and direction to the observer, and the spatial relations that qualify them. The resulting model is represented in a way that constitutes a modeling support for the study of environmental scenes, and a contribution for further research oriented to the mapping of a verbal description onto a geographical information system-based representation

Large sample theory of intrinsic and extrinsic sample means on manifolds--II

This article develops nonparametric inference procedures for estimation and testing problems for means on manifolds. A central limit theorem for Frechet sample means is derived leading to an asymptotic distribution theory of intrinsic sample means on Riemannian manifolds. Central limit theorems are also obtained for extrinsic sample means w.r.t. an arbitrary embedding of a differentiable manifold in a Euclidean space. Bootstrap methods particularly suitable for these problems are presented. Applications are given to distributions on the sphere S^d (directional spaces), real projective space RP^{N-1} (axial spaces), complex projective space CP^{k-2} (planar shape spaces) w.r.t. Veronese-Whitney embeddings and a three-dimensional shape space \Sigma_3^4.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053605000000093 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org