Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London 2011

When the eccentric and reclusive connoisseur William Beckford (1760-1844), having exhausted the largest inherited fortune in England, finally abandoned his doomed architectural extravaganza at Fonthill Abbey, he retired to Bath. His enthusiasm for tower-building soon revived, and with the help of his trusted gardener Vincent and an able young architect Henry Goodrich he set about making a linear landscape garden stretching from his home in Lansdown Crescent to the hilltop 100m above. Though the Crescent house he lived in, and the tower he built on the hill, survive with little change, everything in between is now lost beneath more recent development.

This paper looks at the possibilities of re-engaging with imagery and symbolism from earlier cultures through the medium of 3D digital environments. It examines three of the author's digital artworks - Oculus, Lux Nova and Music of the Spheres - as vehicles for this process, and the means by which this engagement with the past can also generate new ideas within the area of art and technology. The recreation of an architectural sense of space and position is of particular importance, as is the development of particular approach to 3D software.

Optical measurement systems were originally developed for industrial applications. Due to their versatility of use and "touchless" non-invasive method of working they have also been employed for many years in the field of restoration, conservation and preservation of cultural heritage. The capabilities of a variety of optical measuring methods e.g. photogrammetry, laser triangulation and interferometry have been theoretically described and their varying applications for restoration and conservation explored 10 years ago. This paper provides an overview of the utilization and implementation of Optical Measurement Systems in the field of restoration, conservation and preservation of cultural heritage that could be observed over the last ten years. Theory and function of the above mentioned systems for shape and deformation measurement of Cultural Heritage will be introduced shortly. The paper will then focus on the practical benefit of Optical Technology such as: 3D and digital archiving, monitoring of deterioration and deformation over time, precise copying and reconstruction, documentation and research, transportation packaging, etc.

Increasingly museums are developing information systems and guides to be accessed from small mobile devices. Some of these initiatives utilise proprietary hardware and software that can require substantial development resources. More recently museums have had the option to target personal mobile devices, (e.g. Apple iPhone or Google Android handsets) which potentially require a lower investment cost on the part of the institution. While the sophistication of these handheld devices means that a large volume of information can be stored and displayed, the challenge for museums is to provide usable access via the small screen area available. Taking examples from work done during the development of the British Museum multimedia guide, this paper discusses the processes and techniques available for usability testing in a 'live' museum environment and shows how the use of low-cost usability and user testing techniques can be quickly fed back into the development process, making a valuable contribution to the ultimate design and effectiveness of the user interface.

Educating and engaging museum audiences in contemporary times is becoming even more important, considering the persistent information society, which has created the need for museums to utilise new methods of communication. Digitisation has therefore become the new instrument for access and preservation in museums. However, the process of digitisation has brought about many challenges for museums, one of the most problematic is deciding what to digitise in the first instance from the wide range of collections. This paper presents a case study of the Hermitage museum and its process of digitising a small part of its large collection, as well as the procedures and strategies regarding the main selection criteria for the objects to be digitised. This study is based on qualitative research using a case study of the Hermitage museum utilizing interviews with the museum's officials responsible for digital collections and projects managers of the International Business Machine (IBM) Corporation, who developed the digital library for the museum. The study employs the analysis of the empirical material and draws on the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Fiona Cameron, and others. It reveals that the selection process of the objects being digitised is still crucial and relevant for the current agenda of digitisation in museums. The results of the analysis suggest that such a selection process should be more open and should rely on the opinion of interested communities and museum stakeholders.

This paper looks at the online presence of the exhibition 'Things' by artist Keith Wilson that took place at Wellcome Collection in October 2010. It examines the process by which objects were temporarily acquired from members of the public for an exhibition, and the way in which those images were digitised and managed to form the online element of the exhibition, using the photo sharing website Flickr. It looks at the role of student volunteers and their reaction to the use of technology, as well as the reactions of the public to the use of images online to represent their donated objects, and some alternatives to the conventional 'object' photography that museums employ. It draws the conclusion that images, and digital images in particular, form an increasingly important part of the museum paradigm at all levels.

Social media has emerged as a prominent element in the current digital landscape and its widespread use reflects how Web 2.0 technologies have become embedded in our lives. Use of social media technologies for learning signals a departure from the use of purely educational or institutional technologies, where educators or the institutions control the technology and the content and impose the rules. This development brings unique and fundamental opportunities, alongside challenges, for rethinking learning in museums. In a museum context, social media tools may make it possible for people to situate objects within contextual information, enable users to make links with other objects or topics and initiate discussions among them. These processes highlight the social aspect of museum experience, advocated by Falk and Dierking (1992; 2000), and it is thus hypothesised that use of social media will lead to - and enhance - a shared understanding around objects, which will facilitate the meaning-making process and thus, learning. The study presented in this paper (part of a PhD research project) is concerned with the potential of Web 2.0 technologies for enhancing young people's museum learning experience and facilitating their meaning-making process.

As an island nation, the UK has a rich maritime heritage charting centuries of international trade and exploration. Evidence of this lies in abundance around the coastline in the form of historic shipwrecks. From 17th century remnants of Samuel Pepys navy off Goodwin Sands to bomb laden WWII liberty ships in the Thames estuary. Unlike land based heritage sites, the majority of these underwater locations are virtually invisible to the public gaze. Their inaccessibility limits public perception of their importance; out of sight, out of mind. In rare cases, e.g. the Mary Rose, the wrecks are recovered and placed in purpose built museums alongside artefacts recovered from them. The enormous cost of archaeological recovery, preservation and exposition restricts this practice.

Weather forecasts are nearly always portrayed from either a satellite view perspective, a numerical or symbol based representation. None of these methods actually portray weather visually from the point of view of the observer, that is, they do not represent our experience of weather. This problem presents a challenge to displaying weather using real-time 3D computer graphics. 3D Weather is a proposed method to solve this problem, to create more believable representations of the weather using real weather data. By employing computer graphic techniques and computer game concepts the project intends to create a localized display of weather using mapping and weather data. Started in 2010, the project has been exploring existing techniques, scoping out the needs of stakeholders (such as the Met Office), and creating a prototype to explore the issues. The paper concludes that the quest for realism with computer graphics can be a double-edged sword. It can lead to expectations of accuracy in the data its meant to represent, which can be desired, but in the case of the weather forecast the representation is not necessary what the weather will be, its what the weather might be. The continuing project will explore the balance of issues when representing the weather for past events as well as for forecasts.

Projection of 3D space onto a 2D surface relies on the computer graphics camera, which is designed like the camera obscura. The procedure follows the laws of perspective projection and does not explicitly consider the viewer of the rendered image. Our approach is to extend this camera model in order to involve human perception into the rendering of 3D scenes. The aim is to create a user-centred spatial impression by a 2D image. By integrating the user into this process, implicit interactions can be applied to provide interfaces for an efficient and coherent communication of information in virtual environments. This paper introduces user-specific and context-specific parameters that must be taken into account when designing presence-aware applications. To this end, we present a concept of an interactive exhibition based on implicit interaction and point out its applicability in information design of three-dimensional scenes.