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PANEL ONE ABSTRACTS
VIRTUAL HERITAGE IN TIME, SPACE AND PLACE Maurizio Forte, University of California, Merced, Virtual Heritage can define all the digital processes connected with a multidisciplinary approach to the interpretation, knowledge and communication of cultural heritage. The interpretation and communication process is created by spatial-temporal coordinates but it depends on the sense of place transmitted through cross-cultural domains. This gap of distance in time, space and place between present and past can be partially filled by a virtual reality environment, where the simulation is able to reproduce a holistic context of the cybernetic information. This simulation represents a possible past and the interaction determines the level of communication and exchange with the space (uncoded), first, and the place (coded), then. The result of the mutual eco-interaction and feedback between users and environment constitutes the virtual heritage process. VR, for now mainly offline, but destined to migrate and settle permanent on the web, constitutes the concluding segment of a process of knowledge-communication, precisely because it is able to produce first difference, then knowledge and communication. “If information is a ‘difference that produces difference,’ then the domain of information is balanced between too much and too little difference. On the one hand, information is difference and thus where there is no difference, there is no information; on the other hand, information is a difference which produces a difference”(BATESON, 1979). Most part of the world seems to be interested mainly towards technological and digital aspects of the Virtual, but this direction is over-technological without a correct evaluation of the relations between mind and environment. We’d like imagine the Virtual like a 3D cyberspace in which artificial organisms and humans interact, move, grow on the basis of rules of the artificial societies and of the relations of the ecosystems; the realm of the Virtual, in technical sense, includes all the 3D worlds where the action/reaction/retroaction is free and in real time. There are some promising and innovative research paths in this field such as: VR Web GIS, Virtual Communities, Cybergames, and multiuser collaborative environments. In this paper an overview of archaeological case studies concerning VR multiuser applications will be presented, from the micro scale (monument or intra-site) to the macro scale (landscape). REMOTE SENSING TECHNOLOGY AND ANGKOR WAT Damian Evans, University of Sydney The remote sensing project of Angkor Wat has revealed that beyond the well-known temples was a vast collection of interlinked water management devices such as canals, reservoirs interspersed with small local temples and occupation features such as mounded areas and ponds. It is through radar and aerial photography that we have been able to build a detailed new picture of an intricately designed settlement stretching for many miles around the temples. This work was accomplished through the collaboration of Australian, Cambodian, and French researchers who used hand-drawn maps, ground surveys, airborne photography, and ground-sensing radar provided by the U.S. space agency NASA. From this data, we have identified more than a thousand previously undetected man-made ponds and 74 long-lost temples. For over one hundred years the research focus at Angkor has been on the magnificent temples, and on the sandstone inscriptions that are often found with them. It has only been with the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1990s and the opening up of local research centers that people started to look beyond these great structures to investigate where people lived and how they maintained themselves. We now know that the medieval settlement surrounding Angkor—the one-time capital of the Khmer empire that flourished between the ninth and 14th centuries—covered a 3,000 square kilometer area. The urban complex was at least three times larger than archaeologists has previously suspected and was the largest pre-industrial urban area of its kind, eclipsing comparable developments such as the Mayan city of Tikal on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. It remains to be seen whether the engineering feats of Angkor were a cause, a symptom, or a result of the city's decline. The new map at least tells us where we ought to be looking for the answers. IMAG(N)ING SHUILU’AN: A MULTIMEDIA ARCHIVAL REPOSITORY Harlan Wallach, Northwestern University Imag(n)ing Shuilu’an is a project designed to deliver results across a broad range of goals, both practical and conceptual in addressing the development of a rich, complex multimedia archival repository. The American side of the collaborative project was funded by the Andrew W Mellon foundation and Northwestern University. The Chinese side of the collaborative project was funded by the appropriate government agencies associated with the preservation of Cultural relics in China, at the local, regional and national level. The project produced a complete two-dimensional, high-resolution photographic record of the Shuilu’an temple while conducting experimental three-dimensional acquisition in a variety of formats, methods and procedures. It was designed to bring and disseminate the digital acquisition expertise, techniques and research efforts pioneered at Northwestern University to the Chinese partner institution, the Xi’an Center for Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Relics A network mediated model was created for the development of descriptive metadata associated with the media content. Lastly it was designed to explore and evaluate the scholarly use of a unified network based interface. This interface enables the exploration of the different acquired data sets in context with the physical relationships of the original objects, and preserves those relationships as they reside in the temple. As such, this project in its entirety can be described as being use-neutral. Use-neutral meaning - Each aspect of the component phases of this project; acquisition, production, preservation and presentation, can be demonstrated to be useful across a broad range of disciplines. This paper will describe each of the developed data sets, and the tools developed to build the metadata and the prototype site to present the unified data set. |
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