In this paper we present our experience in using Virtual Reality Technologies to accurately reconstruct and further explore ancient and historic city buildings. Virtual reality techniques provide a powerful set of tools to explore and access the history of a city. In order to explore, visualize and hear such history, we divided the process in three phases: historical data gathering and analysis; 3D reconstruction and modeling; interactive immersive visualization, auralization and display. The set of guidelines devised helped to put into practice the extensible tools available in VR but not always easy to put together by inexperienced users. These guidelines also helped the smoothness of our work and helped avoiding problems in the subsequent phases. Most importantly, the X3D standard provided an environment capable of helping the design and validation process as well as the visualization phase. To finalize, we present the results achieved and further analyze the extensibility of the framework. Although VR tools and techniques are widely available at present, there is still a gap between using the tools and really taking advantage of VR in historic architectural reconstruction so that users might immerse themselves into this world and thus be able to consider various scenarios and possibilities that might lead to new insightful inspiration. This is an ongoing process that we think will increase and help current architectural development.

Inspired by principles for designing musical instruments we implemented a new 3D virtual instrument with a particular mapping of touchable virtual spheres to notes and chords of a given musical scale. The objects are metaphors for note keys organized in multiple lines, forming a playable spatial instrument where the player can perform certain sequences of notes and chords across the scale employing short gestures that minimizes jump distances. The idea of different arrangements for notes over the playable space is not new, being pursued on alternative keyboards for instance. This implementation employed an Oculus Rift and a Razer Hydra for gesture input and showed that customization of instrumental mappings using 3D tools can contribute to ease the performance of complex songs by allowing fast execution of specific note combinations.

No abstract

No abstract