Mobile Cross Reality for cultural heritage

Abstract

Abstract-Widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets has enabled people to multiplex their physical reality, where they engage in face-to-face social interaction, with Web-based social networks and apps, whilst emerging 3D Web technologies hold promise for networks of parallel 3D virtual environments to emerge. Although current technologies allow this multiplexing of physical reality and 2D Web, in a situation called PolySocial Reality, the same cannot yet be achieved with 3D content. Cross Reality was proposed to address this issue; however so far it has focused on the use of fixed links between physical and virtual environments in closed lab settings, limiting investigation of the explorative and social aspects. This paper presents an architecture and implementation that addresses these shortcomings using a tablet computer and the Pangolin virtual world viewer to provide a mobile interface to a corresponding 3D virtual environment. Motivation for this project stemmed from a desire to enable students to interact with existing virtual reconstructions of cultural heritage sites in tandem with exploration of the corresponding real locations, avoiding the adverse temporal separation caused otherwise by interacting with the virtual content only within the classroom. The accuracy of GPS tracking emerged as a constraint on this style of interaction.

Heritage Buildings Representation and Extended Realities

“…An umbrella term that is used to represent the whole spectrum including AR, MR, AV, VR and everything in between, is referred to as (XR) "Extended Reality" (Andrade & Bastos, 2019;Storchi, 2018) or "Cross Reality" (Davies, Miller, & Allison, 2013;Reilly et al, 2010;Paradiso & Landay, 2009), while Bekele, Pierdicca, Frontoni, Malinverni, & Gain (2018) used the term "Immersive Reality". Bekele and Champion (2019b) argue that common definitions of Augmented Reality (AR), Augmented Virtuality (AV), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) in current literature are based on outdated display technologies, and a relationship between virtuality and reality, without consideration to the importance of the users necessarily complicit sense of immersion.…”

Exploring the past with Google Cardboard

“…Davies et al [3] details the design and implementation of a Virtual Time Window (VTW) system that facilitates on-site, mobile exploration of heritage sites with a tablet running a virtual world viewer connected wirelessly to an OpenSim server on which the virtual reconstruction of the Cathedral is hosted (see Fig 6). The system uses GPS data to facilitate location tracking as well as sensors (accelerometer and magnetometer) to synchronise the user's position in the real world with the avatar's position in the virtual environment, without the need for explicit interaction (i.e.…”

Ray-on, an On-Site Photometric Augmented Reality Device

“…The goal of this project was to overlay old prints related to what was captured in the live video feed. More recently, Davies et al [2013] presented a tablet PC equipped with a GPS that allows the display of virtual models of historical buildings at their right place, with precision being limited to around 2m by the used geolocalization technology.…”