Between the 13-14 November 2018,
I gave a presentation entitled "Underwater Virtual Reality Excavation"
at the Visual Heritage Expo 2018 in Vienna, Austria. Members of the HCI Lab delivered
a live demonstration and many participants tried it out. The demo presented an
implementation of an immersive virtual environment for underwater archaeology
in the form of a serious game. The main focus is on expanding the player’s
knowledge, by teaching them about maritime archaeology and performing two
archaeological procedures - tagging and dredging.
The dredging procedure was
accomplished by implementing and extending an existing voxel-based sand
simulation approach and rasterizing it using the marching cubes algorithm on
the GPU. The extension of the simulation consisted in adding a custom dredging
simulation step that removes the sand from the grid. Also, an alternative
approach for sand slippage using a custom heuristic exists. The game is
developed for the HTC Vive head-mounted display and uses room-scale experience,
allowing the user to move freely in the virtual environment.
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