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Hain, Vladimír; Ganobjak, Michal
doi: 10.1162/pres_a_00309pmid: N/A
An industrial heritage provides one of the most important records of urban development and of the progress of human civilization in the last two centuries. Monumental industrial buildings reflect extraordinary technical and economic development and progress in science and technology. Even after the termination of their original function, industrial heritage buildings and equipment, along with their architecture, still participate in a significant way in the atmosphere of many cities. The research process in our study used the methods of industrial archaeology. In combination with the identified preserved and still valuable parts of the building and preserved original equipment and archival plans, it was possible to reconstruct the hypothetical virtual appearance of the historical monument. For this purpose, the article examines the case study: virtual reality reconstruction of the Old Power Plant in the city of Piešt’any. The contribution of a brief experience in the VR scene of Machinery Hall in the exhibition with its high immersion, located in the historical environment of the original Machinery Hall, had an educational effect (understanding by experience), bringing out the look and functionality of the lost industrial heritage. This effect appears to be an appropriate and meaningful use of VR in practice.
Zamora-Musa, Ronald; Vélez, Jeimy; Paez-Logreira, Heyder
doi: 10.1162/pres_a_00305pmid: N/A
The implementation of 3D virtual reality (VR) environments to represent human culture and heritage has been growing during the last two decades as a result of information and communication technologies (ICT) development. Precisely, regarding virtual heritage development, some weaknesses have been detected such as “lifeless“ environments lacking interaction, and research still under development on learning assessment. In this article, a VR environment is presented, through users taking a virtual tour visiting some elements of cultural heritage of the island of San Andrés, Colombia. In the tour, users participate in a 3D VR environment, answering questions and learning about the cultural heritage of the island. Also, the usability of the VR environment is assessed through SUMI (Software Usability Measurement Inventory) standard ISO9241-11 evaluating aspects such as usefulness and learnability. The results demonstrate that with the implementation of a VR environment about heritage, the users achieved optimum performance with an 80% average of correct answers and a high correlation between learning and the usability of the 3D VR environment.
Cai, Yiyu; Zheng, Jianmin; Zhang, Yuzhe; Wu, Xiaoqun; Chen, Yong; Tan, Bingquan; Yang, Bianyue; Liu, Tianrui; Thalmann, Nadia
doi: 10.1162/pres_a_00303pmid: N/A
In this article, we describe a project on the use of Virtual Reality Continuum (VRC) for applications in culture and heritage. Haw Par Villa, a local heritage site in Singapore, is selected to demonstrate the entire process of VRC-enhanced digitization from laser scanning to 3D mapping and to 3D prototyping, using Madam Snake White as an example. The objective of the research is to investigate an effective and integrated solution to developing VRC applications for culture and heritage. Efforts are made for fidelity in the 3D modeling of the existing heritage for multiple applications, with the aim to popularize them in a simple and effective manner. In particular, in the case of Madam Snake White, we investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of digitization, 3D mapping, and 3D printing. We also discuss the use of online and interactive Madam Snake White as VRC heritage. A small group of volunteers were invited to a trial and their feedback was positive. Future work includes the application of VRC-enabled heritage for humanities education in local schools.
Ren, Pu; Wang, Yan; Zhou, Mingquan; Wu, Zhongke; Zhou, Pengbo; Zhang, Juan
doi: 10.1162/pres_a_00304pmid: N/A
The existing 3D modeling studies of Chinese ancient architecture are mostly procedure driven and rely on fixed construction rules. Therefore, these methods have limited applications in virtual reality (VR) engineering. We propose a data-driven approach to synthesize 3D models from existing 3D data that provides more flexibility and fills the gap between academic studies and VR engineering. First, 3D architecture models were preprocessed and decomposed into components, and the components were clustered by their geometric features. Second, a Bayesian network was generated by learning from the dataset to represent the internal relationships between the architectural components. Third, the inference results of the trained network were utilized to generate a reasonable relationship matching to support the synthesis of the structural components. The proposed method can be used in 3D content creation for VR development and directly supports VR applications in practice.
Hoang, Thuong N.; Cox, Travis N.
doi: 10.1162/pres_a_00307pmid: N/A
Virtual and augmented reality technologies are increasingly utilized by public-facing galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) institutions to convey both heritage and contemporary stories, information, and experiences. However, within these media, the visitors are often overwhelmed by the virtual environment, resulting in the cultural heritage content being pushed to the background. In this article, we present the alternating reality (AltR) narrative that supports the communication of cultural heritage as an interweaving experience that alternates between real and virtual environments. AltR allows both the cultural heritage content and digital technology to play an equal role in augmenting, highlighting, or explicating each other and conveying a shared narrative to the visitors of GLAM institutions. We introduce the AltR experience through an exhibition highlighting the physical replica and contemporary reimagining of one of Walter and Marion Griffin’s buildings. We conducted a study of the AltR experience during the exhibition using a low-cost virtual reality cardboard viewer that lends itself to an intuitive transition between the two environments. The findings showed that the interweaving experiences between the physical replica of cultural heritage and its virtual reimagining allows the visitors to draw the connection between the two sources of information. The narrative is created and controlled by the visitors, leading to an enjoyable experience. Finally, we reflect on the design implications of an AltR narrative for cultural heritage applications derived from the findings of the study.
Pang, Wee-Ching; Wong, Choon-Yue; Seet, Gerald
doi: 10.1162/pres_a_00306pmid: N/A
In this article, the challenges facing museums to offer more ways to provide information for learning have been reviewed. The use of social robotics has been explored within a museum setting, for guiding tours as well as for learning heritage languages and cultures. The article focuses on the design and development of two social robots for a heritage museum. The first robot is a virtual human character mounted on a mobile robotic platform. It has been implemented to serve as a museum guide. The second robot is a humanoid. It is programmed for bilingualism, which injected elements of culture learning and education. The objective was to develop robots as well as robotic and virtual reality applications primarily, and to explore the usability of these technologies in a heritage museum. The implemented robots have been deployed to validate the development work and to evaluate the feasibility of using these robots for cultural education among young children. Finally, we discuss our deployment experiences and offer suggestions for future work to improve the viability of the robots for a more elaborated deployment at public museums.
Chen, L.; Jung, C. R.; Musse, S. R.; Moneimne, M.; Wang, C.; Fruchter, R.; Bazjanac, V.; Chen, G.; Badler, N. I.
doi: 10.1162/pres_a_00308pmid: N/A
Crowd simulation addresses algorithmic approaches to steering, navigation, perception, and behavioral models. Significant progress has been achieved in modeling interactions between agents and the environment to avoid collisions, exploit empirical local decision data, and plan efficient paths to goals. We address a relatively unexplored dimension of virtual human behavior: thermal perception, comfort, and appropriate behavioral responses. Thermal comfort is associated with the ambient environment, agent density factors, and interpersonal thermal feedback. A key feature of our approach is the temporal integration of both thermal exposure and occupant density to directly influence agent movements and behaviors (e.g., clothing changes) to increase thermal comfort. Empirical thermal comfort models are incorporated as a validation basis. Simple heat transfer models are used to model environment, agent, and interpersonal heat exchange. Our model’s generality makes it applicable to any existing crowd steering algorithm as it adds additional integrative terms to any cost function. Examples illustrate distinctive emergent behaviors such as balancing agent density with thermal comfort, hysteresis in responding to localized or brief thermal events, and discomfort and likely injury produced by extreme packing densities.
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