Interpretation at the controller's edge: designing graphical user interfaces for the digital publication of the excavations at Gabii (Italy)

This paper discusses the authors’ approach to designing an interface for the Gabii Project’s digital volumes that attempts to fuse elements of traditional synthetic publications and site reports with rich digital datasets. Archaeology, and classical archaeology in particular, has long engaged with questions of the formation and lived experience of towns and cities. Such studies might draw on evidence of local topography, the arrangement of the built environment, and the placement of architectural details, monuments and inscriptions (e.g. Johnson and Millett 2012). Fundamental to the continued development of these studies is the growing body of evidence emerging from new excavations. Digital techniques for recording evidence “on the ground,” notably SFM (structure from motion aka close range photogrammetry) for the creation of detailed 3D models and for scene-level modeling in 3D have advanced rapidly in recent years. These parallel developments have opened the door for approaches to the study of the creation and experience of urban space driven by a combination of scene-level reconstruction models (van Roode et al. 2012, Paliou et al. 2011, Paliou 2013) explicitly combined with detailed SFM or scanning based 3D models representing stratigraphic evidence. It is essential to understand the subtle but crucial impact of the design of the user interface on the interpretation of these models. In this paper we focus on the impact of design choices for the user interface, and make connections between design choices and the broader discourse in archaeological theory surrounding the practice of the creation and consumption of archaeological knowledge. As a case in point we take the prototype interface being developed within the Gabii Project for the publication of the Tincu House. In discussing our own evolving practices in engagement with the archaeological record created at Gabii, we highlight some of the challenges of undertaking theoretically-situated user interface design, and their implications for the publication and study of archaeological materials

EgoFace: Egocentric Face Performance Capture and Videorealistic Reenactment

Face performance capture and reenactment techniques use multiple cameras and sensors, positioned at a distance from the face or mounted on heavy wearable devices. This limits their applications in mobile and outdoor environments. We present EgoFace, a radically new lightweight setup for face performance capture and front-view videorealistic reenactment using a single egocentric RGB camera. Our lightweight setup allows operations in uncontrolled environments, and lends itself to telepresence applications such as video-conferencing from dynamic environments. The input image is projected into a low dimensional latent space of the facial expression parameters. Through careful adversarial training of the parameter-space synthetic rendering, a videorealistic animation is produced. Our problem is challenging as the human visual system is sensitive to the smallest face irregularities that could occur in the final results. This sensitivity is even stronger for video results. Our solution is trained in a pre-processing stage, through a supervised manner without manual annotations. EgoFace captures a wide variety of facial expressions, including mouth movements and asymmetrical expressions. It works under varying illuminations, background, movements, handles people from different ethnicities and can operate in real time

Towards the 3D Web with Open Simulator

Continuing advances and reduced costs in computational power, graphics processors and network bandwidth have led to 3D immersive multi-user virtual worlds becoming increasingly accessible while offering an improved and engaging Quality of Experience. At the same time the functionality of the World Wide Web continues to expand alongside the computing infrastructure it runs on and pages can now routinely accommodate many forms of interactive multimedia components as standard features - streaming video for example. Inevitably there is an emerging expectation that the Web will expand further to incorporate immersive 3D environments. This is exciting because humans are well adapted to operating in 3D environments and it is challenging because existing software and skill sets are focused around competencies in 2D Web applications. Open Simulator (OpenSim) is a freely available open source tool-kit that empowers users to create and deploy their own 3D environments in the same way that anyone can create and deploy a Web site. Its characteristics can be seen as a set of references as to how the 3D Web could be instantiated. This paper describes experiments carried out with OpenSim to better understand network and system issues, and presents experience in using OpenSim to develop and deliver applications for education and cultural heritage. Evaluation is based upon observations of these applications in use and measurements of systems both in the lab and in the wild.Postprin

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

Shape: A 3D Modeling Tool for Astrophysics

We present a flexible interactive 3D morpho-kinematical modeling application for astrophysics. Compared to other systems, our application reduces the restrictions on the physical assumptions, data type and amount that is required for a reconstruction of an object's morphology. It is one of the first publicly available tools to apply interactive graphics to astrophysical modeling. The tool allows astrophysicists to provide a-priori knowledge about the object by interactively defining 3D structural elements. By direct comparison of model prediction with observational data, model parameters can then be automatically optimized to fit the observation. The tool has already been successfully used in a number of astrophysical research projects.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in the "IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics