Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
To obtain efficient effects with augmentation, both technologies were applied in
a creative way to generate a cognitive and aesthetic impact on the user.
15.2.2
Between Scientific Experiment and Re-enactment
The recapture of a technology means primarily the identification of the
chaînes-
opératoires
through experiment. For recovering Vadastra's prehistoric technologies
of ceramic vase and textiles making, a series of campaigns were organised between
2002 and 2012. As a result these technologies were recuperated and transferred to
the local community. But for transmitting these technical processes to the persons
outside the circle of experimentalists, and to make them attractive for the young
people who were supposed to learn them and transmit them to the future, the simple
recovery of the technical gestures was not sufficient. Here the reconstructed contexts
come into play, where the prehistoric wattle and daub constructions, ceramic vases,
or the textiles woven on different kind of looms, as well as the performances
of producing these objects, were introduced as augmented information. One such
example of a performance in context concerns a woman working at a horizontal
loom, sitting on a bench, inside a decorated wattle and daub house.
All performances were filmed with professional video cameras, after which the
films were post-processed to render in a suggestive way the technological processes
and employed as augmentations in a geo-based AR application. Another stage was
an advanced usage of these films to augment the VR reconstructed contexts and
to create an AV environment. This was possible with extensions of current AR
technologies, such as Metaio, which can be integrated with the Unity3D game
engine.
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15.2.3
The Reconstruction of Objects in Reality
and Virtual Reality
The following stage of approaching the Past in a fractal way was the utilisation
of real or virtual objects resulted from each technology experimented, to populate
the hybrid contexts created, augmenting them with important information about the
spatial organisation and utilisation, and creating a good medium for the immersion
of the viewer. As de-contextualised objects they constituted the data bases of “virtual
museums”.
To present real and virtual objects together on mobile phones, we created a
geo-based AR application (
ARt-chaeology,
see Fig.
15.1
) with the capacity of
identifying geographic locations and triggering visual information under the form
