Il museo virtuale della Valle del Calore

The Virtual Museum of the Upper Calore Valley is a website which allows visitors to travel in time and space through and have access to various information on monuments, towns, culture, history, wine and food of the Hirpinian territory. By accessing six fictional videos on characters drawn from local history, users can also experience a historical overview, from the Longobard invasion up to the Unification of Italy, through the troubled periods of the Kingdom of Naples. The project works by open source software for video editing, GIS elaboration, and image processing. The browsing platform is based on the earliest release of the Aton framework created by CNR ITABC for browsing large-scale geographical and architectural data, with advanced features for graphic rendering, stereoscopic view, online representation of complex geometry and resolution through powerful paging algorithms. Aton is compatible with every modern HTML5 multimedia standard and is a powerful tool for historical storytelling

The Winckelmann300 Project: Dissemination of Culture with Virtual Reality at the Capitoline Museum in Rome

The best way to disseminate culture is, nowadays, the creation of scenarios with virtual and augmented reality that supply the visitors of museums with a powerful, interactive tool that allows to learn sometimes difficult concepts in an easy, entertaining way. 3D models derived from reality-based techniques are nowadays used to preserve, document and restore historical artefacts. These digital contents are also powerful instrument to interactively communicate their significance to non-specialist, making easier to understand concepts sometimes complicated or not clear. Virtual and Augmented Reality are surely a valid tool to interact with 3D models and a fundamental help in making culture more accessible to the wide public. These technologies can help the museum curators to adapt the cultural proposal and the information about the artefacts based on the different type of visitor’s categories. These technologies allow visitors to travel through space and time and have a great educative function permitting to explain in an easy and attractive way information and concepts that could prove to be complicated. The aim of this paper is to create a virtual scenario and an augmented reality app to recreate specific spaces in the Capitoline Museum in Rome as they were during Winckelmann’s time, placing specific statues in their original position in the 18th century

ARIADNE: A Research Infrastructure for Archaeology

Research e-infrastructures, digital archives, and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades have become ever more collaborative, distributed, and data intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organization, analysis, and presentation of research results of individual projects. However, the provision of e-infrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access, and (re)use have lagged behind. This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE, the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This EU-funded network has developed an e-infrastructure that enables data providers to register and provide access to their resources (datasets, collections) through the ARIADNE data portal, facilitating discovery, access, and other services across the integrated resources. This article describes the current landscape of data repositories and services for archaeologists in Europe, and the issues that make interoperability between them difficult to realize. The results of the ARIADNE surveys on users’ expectations and requirements are also presented. The main section of the article describes the architecture of the e-infrastructure, core services (data registration, discovery, and access), and various other extant or experimental services. The ongoing evaluation of the data integration and services is also discussed. Finally, the article summarizes lessons learned and outlines the prospects for the wider engagement of the archaeological research community in the sharing of data through ARIADNE

Encoding immersive sessions for online, interactive VR analytics

Capturing and recording immersive VR sessions performed through HMDs in explorative virtual environments may offer valuable insights on users’ behavior, scene saliency and spatial affordances. Collected data can support effort prioritization in 3D modeling workflow or allow fine-tuning of locomotion models for time-constrained experiences. The web with its recent specifications (WebVR/WebXR) represents a valid solution to enable accessible, interactive and usable tools for remote VR analysis of recorded sessions. Performing immersive analytics through common browsers however presents different challenges, including limited rendering capabilities. Furthermore, interactive inspection of large session records is often problematic due to network bandwidth or may involve computationally intensive encoding/decoding routines. This work proposes, formalizes and investigates flexible dynamic models to volumetrically capture user states and scene saliency during running VR sessions using compact approaches. We investigate image-based encoding techniques and layouts targeting interactive and immersive WebVR remote inspection. We performed several experiments to validate and assess proposed encoding models applied to existing records and within networked scenarios through direct server-side encoding, using limited storage and computational resources

INTERACTIVE 3D LANDSCAPES ON LINE

The paper describes challenges identified while developing browser embedded 3D landscape rendering applications, our current approach and work-flow and how recent development in browser technologies could affect. All the data, even if processed by optimization and decimation tools, result in very huge databases that require paging, streaming and Level-of-Detail techniques to be implemented to allow remote web based real time fruition. Our approach has been to select an open source scene-graph based visual simulation library with sufficient performance and flexibility and adapt it to the web by providing a browser plug-in. Within the current Montegrotto VR Project, content produced with new pipelines has been integrated. The whole Montegrotto Town has been generated procedurally by CityEngine. We used this procedural approach, based on algorithms and procedures because it is particularly functional to create extensive and credible urban reconstructions. To create the archaeological sites we used optimized mesh acquired with laser scanning and photogrammetry techniques whereas to realize the 3D reconstructions of the main historical buildings we adopted computer-graphic software like blender and 3ds Max. At the final stage, semi-automatic tools have been developed and used up to prepare and clusterise 3D models and scene graph routes for web publishing. Vegetation generators have also been used with the goal of populating the virtual scene to enhance the user perceived realism during the navigation experience. After the description of 3D modelling and optimization techniques, the paper will focus and discuss its results and expectations

Jim the man: reminiscences by his friends

[Introduction] This volume celebrates the many achievements of Jim Lowry. He was without doubt one of the foremost amphipod taxonomists of his time and his publication record is testament to this. To his friends, however, he was much more than the sum of his scientific works. He was a warm and generous colleague who enriched our lives. There follow some reminiscences by his friends, reliving memorable times spent in his company, along with a selection of photos taken over the last three decades. … (cont.

Five decades in carcinology—a tribute to Jim Lowry

James Kenneth Lowry arrived at the Australian Museum in 1976 with a recent PhD from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and loads of enthusiasm. He was appointed as Curator of Crustacea, a role that was later changed to Research Scientist, and then Principal Research Scientist. Jim made a huge impact on the study of Crustacea as a taxonomist, editor, and an avid collector. A search of the Marine Invertebrates collection database at the Australian Museum returned 12,790 registered lots collected by Jim. This number will grow as more collections made by Jim are studied and registered. From his retirement in 2015 until his death in 2021, Jim continued his research as a Senior Fellow with the Australian Museum, still writing papers and dreaming up new research questions. He believed in the importance of good taxonomy, encouraged students and developed collaborations with both fledgling and experienced research scientists. It was Jim’s collaborative and friendly nature that encouraged visitors from around the world to come to the Australian Museum to work on Crustacea and add to the collections, not just in the Amphipoda but other groups, such as cumaceans, ostracods, decapods, isopods, and mysids. The response to the call for papers for this volume in memory of Jim is indicative of his influence. Six of the papers are by former students and papers have been contributed by authors around the world describing research and new taxa of amphipods, mysids, and decapods. Fourteen new species are named in Jim’s honour. Many of the authors have used Delta (DEscription Language for Taxonomy) databases in preparing their contributions. Jim was a keen advocate of DELTA, conducting workshops around the world where he promoted and encouraged the use of Delta databases to improve the rigour of taxonomic descriptions and ease of handling taxonomic data. It is fitting that Jim’s memorial volume be published in Records of the Australian Museum. He was Editor of the Records (as we often referred to it) for 15 years from 1983 and introduced a new style with double columns and large format to update the journal. The range of papers published in this volume is testimony to Jim’s influence in carcinology around the world