What is Virtual Heritage?!Erik Champion, Curtin University!

1!

Why Virtual Heritage?!•  Background in architecture, (art

history) and philosophy!

•  PhD with Lonely Planet in VEs for travel and tourism!

•  Taught interaction design and game design at UQ, UNSW, Massey!

•  Project Manager at DIGHUMLAB (Denmark)!

•  Professor of Cultural Visualisation, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia!

2!

Cultural Visualisation?!Feature! Science! Art! Culture!

Reusable data! Yes! No! Seldom!

Standard tools! Yes! Seldom! Thematic & communal!

Clear research question! Yes! Seldom! Depends!

Null hypothesis! Yes! No! Not often!

Extensible! Mostly! Seldom! Important!

Falsifiable! Yes! Seldom! Difficult!

Stored! Surely! Unlikely! Vital!

3!

VH is not VR!•  “Virtual reality is the use of computers and human-

computer interfaces to create the effect of a three- dimensional world containing interactive objects with a strong sense of three-dimensional presence.”!

•  The importance of using HMDs or CAVEs, for VR apparently requires “a head-tracked, usually a stereoscopic, display that presents the virtual world from the user’s current head position, including the visual cues required..”!

4!

Virtual Heritage is..!•  “[It is]…the use of computer-based interactive

technologies to record, preserve, or recreate artifacts, sites and actors of historic, artistic, religious, and cultural significance and to deliver the results openly to a global audience in such a way as to provide formative educational experiences through electronic manipulations of time and space.”!

•  Stone & Ojika, 2000!

5!

What Is Left Out?!•  Beliefs, rituals, other cultural behaviours and activities?!

•  Traces the level of certainty, and authenticity of reproduction and reveals process? I.e. scholastic rigor?!

•  Sensitive to the needs of audience & shareholder?!

"   Virtual heritage is the attempt to convey not just the appearance but also the meaning and significance of cultural artifacts and the associated social agency that designed and used them, through the use of interactive and immersive digital media.!

6!

New media!the act of reshaping the user experience of exploring realms or worlds through

the innovative use of digital media. "

7!

Definitions !NEW MEDIA: the act of reshaping the user experience through the innovative use of digital media. VIRTUAL HERITAGE: convey the appearance, meaning, significance and social agency that designed and used cultural artifacts and sites, (through the use of interactive and immersive digital media). NEW HERITAGE: re-examine the user experience that digital media can provide for the understanding and experiencing of tangible and intangible cultural heritage

Erik Champion, in Y. E. Kalay, T. Kvan, & J. Affleck, New Heritage: new media and cultural heritage. New York: Routledge, 2008.!

8!

2001-2004 PhD thesis!•  Place versus Cyberspace: What creates a sensation of place (as a

cultural site) in a virtual environment in contradistinction to a sensation of a virtual environment as a collection of objects and spaces?!

•  Cultural Presence versus Social Presence and Presence: Which factors help immerse people spatially and thematically into a cultural learning experience?!

•  Realism versus Interpretation: Does an attempt to perfect fidelity to sources and to realism improve or hinder the cultural learning experience?!

•  Education versus Entertainment: Does an attempt to make the experience engaging improve or hinder the cultural learning experience?!

9!

Four Hypotheses!•  Social learning is inter-active but Culture is also materially

embedded or embodied.!

•  To teach and disseminate immersive Digital History and Virtual Heritage, interaction and the learning that results from that interaction is crucial (see Mosaker, 2001).!

•  To improve interaction, examine games and why they are so successful; academic literature suggests games are best examples of interactive digital engagement (references in Champion, 2008 et al.). !

•  Game-based interaction has to be modified for DH/VH.!11!

Central Point!•  Games are great learning environments !

•  Except for Cultural Significance, history and heritage!

•  Conclusion: problems and solutions!

•  Technology=barrier but not issue: learning is the problem.!

•  Which historical principles are used, learnt and applied?!

•  Inhabitants’ points of view (heritage) is missing!

•  Scholarly cycle incomplete, community cycle inextensible!12!

4 Issues With Culture!•  Definition (and relation to

place and inhabitation)?!

•  How is culture transmitted?!

•  Transmit local situated cultural knowledge to “others”?!

•  VH: how to transmit via digital & augmented media?!

13!

Five Features of Place!1. A place can have a distinct theme, atmosphere, and contextually

related artifacts.*!

2.  Some places have the capacity to overawe.!

3.  Place has the power to evoke memories and associations.!

4.  Place has the capability to act as either stage or framework in which communal and individual activity can ‘take place’.!

5.  Place has the ability to transmit the cultural intentions of individual participants and social ‘bodies’.!

* Place is a process not a product, and can consist of multiple interpretations, conflicts, and a unique combination of borrowed histories. (Doreen Massey).!

14!

Why 3D?!•  To evoke +communicate historical situations or heritage values find

deeper understandings not simply memorize facts (Bloom, 1956). !

•  Place is a cultural setting, it gives cultural interaction a time and a location, Crang (1998, p.103), “Spaces become places as they become ‘time-thickened’”!

•  Places do not just organise space, they orient, identify, and animate the bodies, minds, and feelings of both inhabitants and visitors.!

•  Cultural presence: a feeling in a virtual environment that people with a different cultural perspective occupy or have occupied that virtual environment as a ‘place’.!

15!

Placeness Is More Than 3D!

16!

Why Recreate Place-ness?!

•  Fix locations in the memory (hippocampus).!

•  Reveal design based on scale and senses.!

•  Reveal limitations or principles of historical 2D images.!

•  Provide a heightened sense of difficulty, occasion, ritual, social proxemics (social hierarchies).!

•  Afford a sense of place: peripherality, centre directionality.!

•  Cultural landscapes affected by topography and climate and proximity to resources.!

•  Parts of language affected by geolocation of cultures.!

iSphere copyright Paul Bourke!

Monkey Brain, Human Brain!Caption: The flow of object information in a monkey brain (left) and a human brain.

Credit: Sabine Kastner, Princeton University

18!

Culture is a feedback loop!•  A visitor perceives space as place, and inhabits (modifies a

place), place 'perpetuates culture’, and thus influences the inhabitants in turn. !

•  We might say that social behaviour is behaviour between two or more people. !

•  Cultural behaviour is a subset of social behaviour, where behaviour is governed by or understood in terms of a cultural setting. !

•  As culture almost inevitably involves transactions, there must be objects of shared transactional value.!

19!

Transactional Value Requires Social Judgment!

http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/10/social-media/south-carolina-state-library-launches-social-media-library-and-archive/!

20!

Video Games Pros & Cons!Factors! Weaknesses! Strengths!

Interaction ! Agency destroys historic causality. Simplistic interaction, may be difficult for older audiences.! Helps teach interaction design. !

Engagement ! Educational games: worst of both worlds?! Well-known & popular.!

Learning ! How to promote heritage & knowledge transfer.! Learn by trial and error. Leveling allow for skills learnt!

Technical issues! Often contains many bugs. Often platform specific. ! Speed, lighting, avatar design, peripheries, networking !

Support ! Support by the actual company can be slow, and they may avoid listing intended future features. !

Community support (internet forums).!

Game development !

Non proprietary formats, changing game engine code requires high coding skills!

Education discounts available, some games are easily “modded”. !

Access/ cost ! Expensive software development kits and commercial licenses. Expensive.!

Take them home, personalize modify and share them. !

Institutional value ! Not taken seriously. ! Employability for students.!

21!

22!

LBP1+2!

•  http://www.mediamolecule.com/blog/article/kareems_talk_from_learning_without_frontiers_2011/ !

Games For History!1.  Play and and answer questions!

2.  Play and classroom discuss and debate authenticity!

3.  Role-play with games, puppets, or narrators!

4.  Mod cities, empires events based on theories!

5.  Film events etc. using Machinima tools!

6.  Combine images or panoramas with other media!

7.  Design past artefacts, events, rituals or customs!

8.  Create VEs using games and game mods or using VR!24!

Playing History!Plague – Slave trade - Vikings!

Challenge: ..the belief that it is exciting to learn about history. !

Integrates learning and playing in a way that engages pupils and gives them a concrete feel for the historical time and

setting!Solution: !

Platform: Mac/PC, single player, browser !Technology: 3D Unity game engine!

Playtime: Per game 60 minutes!Target group: 9-14 years old!

25!

2. Discuss and debate!

•  Watch the movie, ‘Gladiator’ ..Identify an item of material culture (building, object, ‘thing’) that is important to the plot and structure of the movie, and..!

•  http://proteus.brown.edu/romanarchaeology08/4986!

NB http://www.playthepast.org/!

26!

3. Role-play!http://publicVR.org !

OR video at http://vimeo.com/25901467!

!27!

Assassins Creed!flickr Niranjan cc shanewarne_60000!

28!

4. RTS-Mod cities empires!

Kurt Squire:!“We are interested in: the

processes by which players develop an interest in history, what historical understandings

develop, and if participation has consequences for

activities such as school.”!

30!

5. Film Events (Machinima) !

http://www.sourcefilmmaker.com/!

http://moviesandbox.com !

http://www.thesims.com/de-de !

31!

6. Combine images, panos !http://www.petermorse.com.au/vrar/vr/ !

Iphone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9sBtuCuju0 !Technical description http://paulbourke.net/dome/UnityiDome/ !

Other pano examples http://paulbourke.net/transient/Beacon/beacontour.html !32!

7. Design past artifacts,!events, rituals or customs!Unreal Tournament / Xibalba-Palenque!

33!

34!

8a. CAVE via game engine!http://cryve.id.tue.nl!

35!

8b. iVEs from VR systems!

http://www.ntnu.no/ub/omubit/bibliotekene/gunnerus-1/mubil !36!

8c.other mods !

37!

Surround projection 2005!

•  !

38!

Warping!

39!

Palenque ported to Unreal!Adobe Atmosphere, Poser, 3D Studio Max, Arc GIS,

PHP, Javascript, HTML!40!

Games and learning!•  Today, electronic games are an important vehicle for learning (Anderson,

2010; Dondlinger, 2007). !

•  A game is an activity that !

•  (1) typically has some goal in mind, something that the player works to achieve, !

•  (2) has systematic or emergent rules, and !

•  (3) is considered a form of play or competition (Oxford, 2010). !

•  While this encompasses “skill and drill” types of games, many of today’s digital games are much more complex, providing an interactive narrative in which the player must test hypotheses, synthesize knowledge, and respond to the unexpected (Dondlinger, 2007).!

41!

Games aren’t Challenging?!

•  A rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable. (Juul 2003, para 15).!

•  A system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome. (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004).!

•  A challenge that offers up the possibility of temporary or permanent tactical resolution without harmful outcomes to the real world situation of the participant (Champion, 2006).!

42!

Games are culturally significant?!

•  For evoking +communicating historical situations or heritage values we must deeper understandings rather than simply memorizing facts (Bloom, 1956). !

•  What is the cultural significance of what is represented and interacted with?!

•  Cultural presence, a feeling in a virtual environment that people with a different cultural perspective occupy or have occupied that virtual environment as a ‘place’.!

43!

Prescriptive or Procedural learning?!

Gamer: Reach objectives as quickly and vividly as possible.! Activity!

Tourist: Enjoy highlights safely and conveniently.! Viz: Weekend in Capri!

Traveller: complete tasks via local affordances.! Activity: Myst"!

Archaeologist: Discover past via examining material remains, geographical changes,

epigraphy etc.!

Viz of process: ArcDig, detective

series?!Anthropologist: Understand the beliefs roles and relationships of inhabitants in context. geographical changes, epigraphy etc.!

affordances.!

Hermeneutic: Myst, Sims? Oblivion?!

44!

Problem: narrative/interaction!

•  How do we interact with history over time?!

•  How does the GOD view interact with inhabitants?!

(Glory of Rome)!

45!

Problem: Interaction /History!•  Ritual knowledge: Match artefacts with events to progress through time!

•  Memetic Cause &effect (Guess results or memes to progress history)!

•  Extrapolate from clues in NPC dialogue!

•  Role-play minor characters, “History” not affected!

•  Counterfactual histories (create many possible worlds)!

•  Augment virtual world with historical or current media!

•  Sentiment analysis (observe the emotional impact of events on NPCs)!

•  Separate lies from truth to progress!

•  Mimic NPCs (as a kind of reverse Cultural Turing Test)!

46!

Problem: Avatars!

•  Realistic depiction!

•  Social behaviour!

•  Interface issues!

http://www.interactivestory.net/ !

Eric Fassbender: Macquarie Lighthouse!

47!

Problem: Inhabitants’ PoV!

•  Can users learn via interaction the meanings and values of others, do we need to interact as the original inhabitants did? !

•  How can we find out how they interacted? !

•  Can the limited and constraining nature of current technology help interaction become more meaningful, educational and enjoyable (Handron & Jacobson, 2010)? !

•  How do we even know when meaningful learning is reached?!

48!

Problem: Rituals!•  Attention/focus!

•  Social judgement!

•  Territoriality!

•  Social Proxemics!

•  Being “in the flow”!

•  Physical delineation (profane vs sacred)!

•  Event-based or regular!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqMXIRwQniA!

Image: http://www.virtualtripping.com/google-earths-rome-reborn/ 2008 !49!

Problem: Sensory immersion!

50!

Affective Process!

51!

Biofeedback middleware!

52!

Kinect 1/2: voice + skeleton!Skyrim has motion tracking and voice commands!

53!

http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=37134!

Vocal Joystick surfs the Web!•  Listen in as someone uses

Vocal Joystick to browse the Web. !

•  Eight vowel sounds move the cursor in different directions. !

•  Louder noises move the cursor more quickly. !

•  The sounds “k” and “ch” simulate clicking and releasing the mouse buttons.!

54!

Problem: Integrate Text+Model!http://gap.alexandriaarchive.org/gapvis/index.html#index !

55!

Problem: Violence!•  No realistic humans!

•  No social judgement!

•  No time to think!

•  Gun based genres are commonplace!

•  Weaponry skill can be easily levelled up!

•  Typical single player!

•  Demographics!56!

57!

Alternatives To Violence!•  Reflexivity: A reflective space, where players relax & consider the consequences of their actions !

•  Performativity: Players asked to perform or orate and present their experience of the VE in class.!

•  RPG Virtue Ethics: Characters change in relation to development of virtue ethics.!

•  Consequentialism: Consequences of player actions affect their future gameplay. through the game. !

•  Creative Uses For Weapons.!

•  NPC distaste and disparagement: they discourage violence.!

•  Biofeedback: Performance based on calmness.!

•  Expressive and embodied modes of interaction.!

•  Non-violent competition.!

•  Players become morally accountable for their actions.!

•  Ritual or mythical use of weapons.!

58!

Alternative game modes!Turkey Maiden Educational Computer Game !

The Journey!http://www.thenightjourney.com/

statement.htm!

http://digitalethnography.dm.ucf.edu/ !

Touchscreen Taoism!!

Chinese Taoism Touch Screen by Neil Wang and Erik Champion!(VSMM2012 conference)!

Opening: !Game Hua - 

http://youtu.be/DiGDezTM8hY!Game Qi1 - 

http://youtu.be/jP9nfdUFDTU!Game Qi2 - 

http://youtu.be/orCga2CQBjs!Game Qin - 

http://youtu.be/iC2BGT5IbDE!Game Shu - 

http://youtu.be/dv_TOnl_sbc!

60!

•  Collaborative learning: HACK4LT, VILNIUS LITHUANIA! 61!

Problem: Book-based?!•  Technology or evaluation is not the fundamental problem.

Skeates (2000) warned that archaeologists need to reconsider their field as a communication medium, and not just as a closed scientific discipline.!

•  Books presuppose a vast domain of knowledge, a certain learnt yet creative technique of extrapolation..!

•  ..They typically do not cover the experiential detective work of experts that visit the real site (Gillings, 2002).!

•  An academic publication is also a simplification and metaphorical extension of the remains and ruins it describes. !

62!

Problem: Book-based?!•  Ideally, virtual environments may help the general public to!

•  create, and share and discuss hypothetical or counterfactual places!

•  meet virtually in these places with colleagues to discuss them!

•  work in these recreations to understand limitations forced on their predecessors!

•  develop experiential ways to entice a potential new audience to both admire the content and the methods of their area of research!

63!

•  Scholarly knowledge does not easily translate to audience knowledge; nor does it always best engage the public. !

•  IF we can use digital worlds for teaching +learning about heritage &history, is it preferable to learn about a collection of culturally situated past experiences, or a strictly academic procession of historical events? !

•  Smith: confusion between history as meaning the past, and history as being something produced by historians. !

•  Given that even philosophers such as Goldstein (1964) and Gale (1962) disagreed on what constitutes history and what constitutes recollection of the past; how can students or the general public reliably distinguish between the two? !

•  How it can be or should be accessed?!

64!

Problem: Evaluation!•  The Siren call of technological determinism and fancy pictures.!

•  Digital media as purely a shop façade for the serious and scholarly past time of reading and writing books (Parry 2005; Gillings, 2002). !

•  Yet if we avoid teaching with digital media, how will the changing attention spans and learning patterns of new generations be best addressed (Mehegan, 2007)?!

•  Even if we decide on what we are evaluating, it is not clear how to evaluate. !

•  The ethnographic techniques used by researchers may be effective in recording activity, but they do not directly indicate the potential mental transformations of perspective that result from being subjectively immersed in a different type of cultural presence (Benford et al, 2002). !

65!

Evaluating VES - People!•  Task performance (quantitative or

qualitative)!

•  Likert or statistical evaluation!

•  Extrapolated understanding!

•  Personal ‘sense’ of cultural presence!

•  What do they choose next (exit strategies)!

•  ‘Teach the teacher’ et al methods!

•  Excitement recorded from biofeedback!

66!

http://lilypadarduino.org/

Mixed Reality!

http://virtual.vtt.fi/virtual/proj2/multimedia/projects/mrconference.html!

http://ael.gatech.edu/lab/research/arsecondlife/using-the-ar-second-life-client/! 68!

The HIVE@CURTIN!

69!

publicVr.org Jeffrey jacobson!70!

71!

puppet control!

72!

73!

74!

75!

76!

The cost of Stereo VR!

77!

78!

79!

WW1 motion capture

aLinked open data and his!

WW1 sim vis project, linked data, his and!

motion capture!80!

Conclusion!•  Games as Virtual Environments may connect more people,

more thematically without competing with book learning.!

•  Background research needed for public vs. scholar needs.!

•  Game conventions ‘work’ but meaningful learning elusive.!

•  We lack interactive and immersive digital history projects that are meaningful and engaging learning experiences.!

•  Mixed reality in history and heritage has many advantages but few working exemplars.!

81!