Digital Cultural Heritage at the NCSA
Channel: UQ Research Computing Centre
Date: 2018-09-24

ABSTRACT:
The Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) is a research team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The AVL is a “Renaissance Team”, where each member of the AVL team plays a unique role and contributes a variety of skills to the process, development, and production. Their expertise includes advanced graphics and visualisation techniques, artistic design, cinematic choreography, multimedia and video production, and data management and render wrangling. The Advanced Visualisation Lab bridges the gap between science and the arts through high resolution production quality cinematic data visualisations for public outreach.

The AVL also works with researchers on digital cultural heritage tools and exhibits for analysis and outreach of historical environments and artefacts. In a collaboration with the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures, the AVL created an interactive kiosk exhibit magnifying the societal role of inscriptions on cylinder seals in ancient Greece. The AVL has also maintained a strong relationship with the digital cultural heritage department at the Cyprus Institute. Past efforts with the Cyprus Institute include interactive analysis of LIDAR scans of artefacts; visiting researcher workshops and remotely collaborative virtual reality explorations of constructed historical environments with the ability to interactively move artefacts within the shared virtual environment using immersive display technology and 6-degree-of-freedom navigation.

The most recent collaboration with the Cyprus Institute is the Real–time Immersive Virtual Environments for Education & Learning (RIVEEL 3D) project, which is developed in the context of the Cyprus Institute’s collaboration with the NCSA, USA, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with the support of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities and the Municipality of Nicosia. RIVEEL3D is a digital archeology application that was developed in partnership with researchers at the Cyprus Institute to explore a comprehensive 3D scanned model database of the medieval city of Nicosia in Cyprus. This application was developed in the Unity game engine. It includes support for VR headsets and physically tracked controllers, and has been developed into a museum-quality educational experience. Dr. Georgios Artopoulos is a co-investigator for RIVEEL3D.

SPEAKER BIO's:
AJ Christensen is a visualisation programmer in the Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Colter Wehmeier is a graduate student in the architecture department at the University of Illinois. In 2013, Colter became a SPIN (Students Pushing INnovation) undergraduate student and later an intern at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). In 2016, Colter became a Fiddler Innovation Fellow, and he spent a year abroad as an assistant researcher at the Cyprus Institute on the island nation of Cyprus.