30 November 2007

VAST 2007 Article

I have just returned from the 8th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (VAST '07) which was held in Brighton, UK, between the 26th to the 30th November 2007. The title of the article is ‘Sense-Enabled Mixed Reality Museum Exhibitions’ and presented a novel pervasive mixed reality framework to a sensor network capturing ambient noise that can be used to create tangible cultural heritage exhibitions. Localisation of the visitors can be established in a hybrid manner based on machine vision and a wireless sensor network allowing visitors to interact naturally or with the help of sensors.

In terms of interface design, a multimodal mixed reality visualisation domain allows for an audio-visual presentation of cultural heritage artifacts. The proposed framework demonstrates the importance and usefulness of sensor-based MR technology to intuitive cultural heritage exhibitions. This enables non-specialist developers, who may be engineers, artists or other non-programmers, to rapidly develop and test pervasive heritage applications in a friendly environment, without having an in-depth knowledge of the hardware specifics of the implementation.

A draft version of the paper can be downloaded from here.