Presentation 1: Visualizing Ancient Egyptian landscapes and material culture: Cultural contexts for immersive visualization and VR (Practitioner Presentation #133)
Authors: Christopher Hoffman
>>Access Video Presentation<<A team of Egyptologists, undergraduate and graduate students, and informatics specialists has come together to develop an immersive visualization experience based on the digital humanities work of two scholars developing visualizations at very different scales. This project bridges the landscape-level visualizations developed by Dr. Elaine Sullivan (UC Santa Cruz) with the object-level visualizations developed by Dr. Rita Lucarelli (UC Berkeley). As a visitor to this ancient Egyptian cultural context, the participant begins with a birds-eye view above the sacred landscape, travels down to the ground, descends beneath the surface, and finally enters a 26th Dynasty tomb where the participant can view translations of hieroglyphics on a massive stone sarcophagus. In this practitioner presentation, the team will demonstrate the Saqqara VR experience and reflect on the lessons learned in terms of techniques developed, design problems encountered, the skills required on the team, and finally the opportunities that this effort has created for immersive visualization technologies in research, teaching and learning spaces.
Presentation 2: Virtual reality for immersive learning in Art History (Full Paper #25)
Authors: Hubert Cecotti, Zachary Day-Scott, Laura Huisinga and Luis Gordo-Pelaez
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Virtual reality (VR) applications using consumer grade headsets have now become popular for immersive learning. VR represents a key technology for showing to students various contents the way it would be presented in its real representation. In addition to the 3 dimensional effect, it includes an immersive dimension that can transport the user into an environment that is specific to the learning content. While teaching material using VR can be useful, such an offer must satisfy the learning objectives of the instructor and the specific needs of the course and the students. In this paper, we propose a VR museum for paintings designed for instructors in Art History. A key contribution is the definition of the painting characteristics and the questionnaires associated with the paintings in the jSON open-standard file format, facilitating the modification of the application without prior programming knowledge. Such a file can be easily edited and it contains only the key information needed by the Art History instructors. The system has been developed with Unity and tested with a Valve Index. The workload and system usability is assessed by 25 participants through a NASA-TLX and System Usability evaluation. The results support the conclusion that the system has a high usability, suggesting its potential deployment in classes of Art History to better engage students.
Presentation 3: Exploring the Rhetorical Affordances of Augmented Reality in the Context of the Anthropocene (Full Paper #61)
Authors: Lili Yan, Mckay Colleni and Breanne K. Litts
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Immersive technology is increasingly recognized for its rhetoric potentials. Similar to traditional genres such as text and image, immersive technology such as Augmented Reality (AR) is also context dependent and can be used to conduct persuasive ends, based on the advantages of their input/output affordances. AR provides new opportunities to represent human-nonhuman relationship rhetorically, which is central to the concept of the Anthropocene. In this study, we reviewed 14 AR applications that are designed for the understanding of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch where human influence is the driving force. Our purpose is to understand what affordances of AR can help to create a rhetoric for the Anthropocene. We identified three major rhetorical affordances of AR in conveying the message of the Anthropocene: virtual objects, point of view, and the input-output link. We argue that the design of these applications is a posthuman endeavor as they can be used as a reflective tool of anthropocentric perceptions supported by the development of technology. We also discuss how AR differs from Virtual Reality (VR) when serving the rhetorical ends. The rhetoric effects can be implicit in AR, but it adds to the layers of meaning when we try to understand the make meaning-processes of AR.
