Contextualization of Archaeological Information Using Augmented Photospheres, Viewed with Head-Mounted Displays

Abstract

Photospheres, or 360 • photos, offer valuable opportunities for perceiving space, especially when viewed through head-mounted displays designed for virtual reality. Here, we propose to take advantage of this potential for archaeology and cultural heritage, and to extend it by augmenting the images with existing documentation, such as 2D maps or 3D models, resulting from research studies. Photospheres are generally produced in the form of distorted equirectangular projections, neither georeferenced nor oriented, so that any registration of external documentation is far from straightforward. The present paper seeks to fill this gap by providing simple practical solutions, based on rigid and non-rigid transformations. Immersive virtual environments augmented by research materials can be very useful to contextualize archaeological discoveries, and to test research hypotheses, especially when the team is back at the laboratory. Colleagues and the general public can also be transported to the site, almost physically, generating an authentic sense of presence, which greatly facilitates the contextualization of the archaeological information gathered. This is especially true with head-mounted displays, but the resulting images can also be inspected using applications designed for the web, or viewers for smartphones, tablets and computers.

The proliferation of virtual laboratories in educational fields

“…More and more instructors use new educational methodologies based on VR, or augmented reality, to capture the attention of students and motivate them in the study of different subjects. In fact, there are numerous examples of the use of VR to improve the teaching-learning process in many disciplines such as: chemistry (Okamoto et al, 2017;Su and Cheng, 2019), archeology (Monna et al, 2019), robotics (Román-Ibáñez et al, 2018), materials science and engineering (Doblack et al, 2011(Doblack et al, , 2014Flores et al, 2012;Meagher et al, 2014;Tarng et al, 2019;Vergara et al, 2017bVergara et al, , 2019, 3D animation (Ho et al, 2019), languages (Legault et al, 2019;Nobrega and Rozenfeld, 2019), photovoltaic installations (Miguel et al, 2019), history (Utami et al, 2019), gynecology (Chang et al, 2019), anatomy (Weyhe et al, 2018), architecture (Maghool et al, 2018), urban planning (Redondo et al, 2017), dentistry (Juan et al, 2016), surgery (Pan et al, 2015), physics (Daineko et al, 2018), electrical installations (Shao et al, 2018), hydraulics (Mirauda et al, 2019), biomedical engineering (Violante and Vezzetti, 2015), etc. These didactic tools are based on VR but there are different combinations of software and hardware to use them, so that it can be found VLs that, among others: (i) are visualized on a computer screen and handled by mouse and keyboard (Daineko et al, 2018); (ii) are based on augmented reality using a smartphone as a HMD and markers to position virtual elements in the real world (Okamoto et al, 2017); and (iii) are based on immersive virtual reality (IVR) displaying the virtual environment on a HMD and handling the VL with specific controllers (Tarng et al, 2019).…”