Research Paper: "Cultural Heritage Layers: Integrating Historic Media in Augmented Reality"

Report - research paper for the group project

I tried to find a paper about a sports tracker or cultural heritage tracker or something, but I couldn’t find anything. It seemed that Nina’s paper was the only article which could be found. After long time of searching I found three articles about augmented reality which is very interesting and could be a further consideration when planning to create a cultural heritage tracker in the future. At the moment the augmented reality programmes are still too expensive and not practical for smart phones. I read two articles about augmented reality. One of them which I finished for our last meeting is called “Cultural Heritage Layers: Integrating Historic Media in Augmented Reality” The link to this article: “Cultural Heritage Layers: Integrating Historic Media in Augmented Reality” I’ll finish the second article just for interest in the next days. It is called “Implementation of Ria Concept and Eye Tracking System for Cultural Heritage” The link to it: “Implementation of Ria Concept and Eye Tracking System for Cultural Heritage”

The first article is about the visualization of cultural heritage like drawings, paintings, photographs of buildings and historic scenes that become superimposed on reality via video through using X3D. They want to give the possibility of simple, not too expensive and sustainable applications for cultural heritage that are telling the history of the cultural content. In the best case the application creates the feeling of being part of a virtual time journey. The text deals with the solutions of problems of augmented reality like the poor visual quality of virtual reconstructed buildings, expensiveness and that there is still no software available which can be used with portable computers or smart phones. In addition it explains how the application is working, but the article is very technical and so I had to read it very careful to understand it. For our group project the text was unfortunately too much technical, but it would be a further possibility for our project considerations.

The second text is about eye tracking and very interesting. The system of eye tracking is a tool for quantifying the eye positions and movements. Where do people look, how long do they look on special kind of cultural content and on which parts of monuments they are focused on etc. The text deals with the RIA (Rich Internet Application) concept and describes it on several examples like Michelangelo’s David. For me the texts were very interesting especially the second one and could give an further overview about new technologies and what is possible today.