Showing papers in "Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage in 2016"

The MIT Museum Glassware Prototype: Visitor Experience Exploration for Designing Smart Glasses

Abstract: With the growth of enthusiasm for the adoption of wearable technology in everyday life, the museum world has also become interested in understanding whether and how to employ smart glasses to engage visitors with new interpretative experiences. The growing interest in wearable technology encourages experimentation with smart glasses, as this trend is going to influence digital media interpretation for museums in the near future. To explore the use of smart glasses in the museum, a Glassware prototype was designed and tested through a field experiment that took place at the Robotics Gallery at the MIT Museum. During the experiment, I observed and then interviewed participants. Finally, I analysed the data following a qualitative research approach. The findings of this study have to be seen as an initial contribution to the design of latest generation of smart glass apps, providing reflections for further studies and projects.

Families and Mobile Devices in Museums: Designing for Integrated Experiences

Abstract: This article presents an observational study of eight families engaging with a bespoke tablet experience produced for a space science centre. It documents the various ways in which family members orientate themselves to the usage of technology in this environment, with a particular focus on the work done to manage the tablet and facilitate the engagement of younger children with the narrative of the experience. These findings are considered in the broader context of the need to design experiences that cater to engagement by families as a whole. We conclude by motivating the need for technologies that are robust in light of regular disengagement and by family members, and which provide functionality to directly support facilitation work.

Classification and Retrieval of Archaeological Potsherds Using Histograms of Spherical Orientations

Abstract: We address the problem of the statistical description of 3D surfaces with the purpose of automatic classification and retrieval of archaeological potsherds. These are particularly interesting problems in archaeology, as pottery comprises a great volume of findings in archaeological excavations. Indeed, the analysis of potsherds brings relevant cues for understanding the culture of ancient groups. In particular, we develop a new local shape descriptor for 3D surfaces, called the histogram of spherical orientations (HoSO), which we use in combination with a bag-of-words approach to compute visual similarity between 3D surfaces. Given a point of interest on a 3D surface, its local shape descriptor (HoSO) captures the distribution of the spherical orientations of its neighboring points. In turn, those spherical orientations are computed with respect to the point of interest itself, both in the azimuth and the zenith axis. The proposed HoSO is invariant to scale transformations and highly robust to rotation and noise. In addition, it is efficient, as it only exploits the information of the position of the 3D points and disregards other types of information like faces or normals. We performed experiments on a set of 3D surfaces representing potsherds from the Teotihuacan civilization and further validations on a set of 3D models of generic objects. Our results show that our methodology is effective for describing 3D models and that it improves classification performance with respect to previous local descriptors.

Methodological Framework for the Design and Development of Applications for Reactivation of Cultural Heritage: Case Study Cisneros Marketplace at Medellin, Colombia

Abstract: The need to preserve and live in cities with value and care for cultural heritage makes information technologies a tool to locate, document, describe, and visualize important urban contexts. With technology resources and the convergence of media such as text, data, maps, charts, pictures, and virtual models, among others, cultural heritage can be celebrated, contemplated, and admired more easily. However, creating an application for reactivation of cultural heritage by citizens remains a challenge because there is no clear methodology to be followed for its development. As far as we know, no one has proposed a methodological framework for applications in this field to determine which aspects should be considered and which tools should be used to successfully develop a cultural heritage application. This article proposes a methodological framework that allows a developer to categorize the type of cultural heritage application to develop and determine which types and quality of resources should be used in the application to provide good usability while fitting project requirements. The methodology is applied for the reactivation of Cisneros marketplace at Medellin, in Colombia, as a case study for testing the framework proposed. This article is part of a project called Reactivation of Cultural Heritage in Colombia using Information and Communication Technologies.

Close-Range Photogrammetric Tools for Epigraphic Surveys

Abstract: In this article, we present a method to carry out a computerized epigraphic survey of historic stones and their engraved epigraphy. In fact, the preservation of archaeological objects has always been an issue of concern for the research community. On the one hand, the fragility of the objects limits their study. On the other hand, such objects are housed in museums, libraries, and institutions worldwide, locations that significantly limit their accessibility. Different survey methods have been carried out in these attempts to overcome the aforementioned limitations. Among them, the MicMac open source software was used in this work to survey and process the dense correlation of the hieroglyphics inscriptions engraved on archaeological stones. Relatively standard workflows have led to depth maps, which can be represented either as 3D point clouds or shaded relief images. This article shows the application of this method in two epigraphic survey case studies.