Carly: There's another exhibit in DC I think we should look into further. It's a more contemporary take on computer generated images and immersion but for technical sakes it may be interesting. The exhibit is Directions: Grazia Toderi at the Hirshhorn. And maybe, if not completely up our alley, if we have time we could visit the American Art Museum for their moving image display. Once again, it could benefit us to look at how these images are being projected and presented to an audience. To me, it would be best for a sense of what's been done before and, therefore, what this area is moving towards.
This visual virtual tour of the Sri Andal Temple is interesting. They created a 3D model of the temple by using Photosynth which utilizes point clouds to create a 3D model using photographs. While great if the project could actually go the sites and take photographs, it seems that this type of 'easy route' may be beyond our grasp. Or is it? Would a program such as Photosynth work using Uhle's archival photographs?
Clark and I have mentioned the Popol Vuh illustration a few times in passing. For Carly, an excerpt of it is here. I saw it as a planetarium show at the Franklin Institute, so imagine it being projected onto a dome that you're looking up at. Here is the website for the entire project; the introduction to it is shows great shots of the 3D reconstructions that were done. The rest of the myth was created in 2.5D (?) and is based on the art of the Quiche Mayan ceramics. The 3D reconstructions of Chichen Itza in the beginning are positively incredible. After looking at the production website closer it appears the designers used 3D capturing (correct me if I'm wrong, but essentially creating a 3D image of an artifact or building by using an existing photograph?) and then brushing up everything in MeshLab.
A concern of mine with this Pachacamac exhibit is how to transition visitors into immersive images on the coast of Peru without losing their interest somewhere along the way. An introduction to the myth of Pachacamac (maybe minimally graphic, because he was a little nuts) or a general introduction to the Incas done in a style similar to the beginning of the Popol Vuh video would give visitors a chance to transition into the culture and the geographic area. Additionally, I find the music in this video minimally annoying.
And last but not least: an article that puts 3D reconstruction into terms that I understand! To be preserved for posterity right here (the PDF in the bottom right hand corner).
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
From Adam - Terrain Update
After a long and convoluted process of importing and exporting to different programs, I have finally created a nice-looking mesh for the Pachacamac terrain. I don't think it spans as far as we would like it to, so I may sample from a larger topographic map later (if I can find one).
If you're interested in how I got from a PDF of the site to a mesh of the terrain, here's my process:
1) I opened the PDF in Illustrator and removed all curves that were not topographic data (i.e. roads, buildings, etc.).
2) I exported the resulting file as a .dwg and opened it in AutoCAD.
3) In AutoCAD, I manually elevated each curve ring to the proper height to create a 3D topographic curve map.
4) In 3DS Max, I opened the .dwg and created a terrain form from the curves. The resulting geometry was absolutely horrible face-wise, but form-wise it looked good. So, I exported the terrain as an .obj.
5) I opened the .obj in Maya and created an nCloth from a plane with many, many subdivisions. I "draped" the nCloth over the 3DS Max terrain to create terrain with mostly uniformly-sized faces. This terrain intersected itself in a few places, though, so I (again) exported the mesh as an .obj.
6) I imported the smoother .obj and took the Sculpt Geometry brush to it, removing any "crunchy" areas.
If you're interested in how I got from a PDF of the site to a mesh of the terrain, here's my process:
1) I opened the PDF in Illustrator and removed all curves that were not topographic data (i.e. roads, buildings, etc.).
2) I exported the resulting file as a .dwg and opened it in AutoCAD.
3) In AutoCAD, I manually elevated each curve ring to the proper height to create a 3D topographic curve map.
4) In 3DS Max, I opened the .dwg and created a terrain form from the curves. The resulting geometry was absolutely horrible face-wise, but form-wise it looked good. So, I exported the terrain as an .obj.
5) I opened the .obj in Maya and created an nCloth from a plane with many, many subdivisions. I "draped" the nCloth over the 3DS Max terrain to create terrain with mostly uniformly-sized faces. This terrain intersected itself in a few places, though, so I (again) exported the mesh as an .obj.
6) I imported the smoother .obj and took the Sculpt Geometry brush to it, removing any "crunchy" areas.
Friday, May 27, 2011
From Carly - Textiles
Thank you Jeanette for your feedback. My brain is moving in a thousand different directions right now, I will certainly look into the floor projection systems more thoroughly but for right now I would like to focus on textiles a little bit:
This paper (which I originally found in the book Making History Interactive from the BAR International Series #2079 edited by Frischer, Crawford, and Koller which is in the lab by my computer if anyone wants to look at it.) is about the author's attempt at a sort of archaeological textile database that can handle large data sets, much like our collection. It is called the Textile Recorder and Visualizer. I looked into his program for a couple reasons. First, I thought it might be a nice way to help organize our data for the textile collection as a whole, and also it seems like it could easily produce nice 3D illustrations of textile structures using basic input data like the dimensions and thread count. This could help with general research and education with less handling of the fragile artifacts, as well as produce some images for the potential exhibit in a timely manor. The program is actually just a wordpress plug-in but unfortunately this author never quite finished his project. My peers here in the lab spent a LOT of time trying to help me install the program yesterday but to no avail (thank you anyway guys!). While the author was able to use his program for 2 datasets, which you can peruse on his website, it seems like he stopped working on it after his paper was due so we were unable to even download the plug-in. He does however invite anyone out there who is interested to contact him and help him complete it.
This was not a total dead-end. The Textile Recorder and Visualizer website did lead me to some more interesting reading. This website is basically the proceedings of 2 conferences on the idea of "virtual touch". I encourage everyone to read through it. I still have to read through a lot of it and I must admit that the idea seems very abstract and difficult to grasp (no pun in tended) right now. The goal is to mimic the experience of touching an object without actually touching it. Obviously this has applications for exhibiting textiles because everyone wants to touch textiles (or is that just me?), but we can not have crowds of people handling archaeological textiles. This also got me thinking about creating a wii-like interactive weaving exhibit. The museum visitor could maybe sit on a stool and look at a screen that shows them sitting at a loom, the person could essentially virtually weave. The resulting virtual cloth could either mimic an object on display, or perhaps the virtual weaver could pick from a few different structures/ yarn colors to design their own cloth.
I have been talking with Adam about animating the weaving process. I found some amazing videos here, on the website for the Royal Ontario Museum. The first animation shows knitting, garment construction, and dressing what appear to be ghosts. The second animation is of dyeing and printing techniques from around the world. The third is an animation of a very basic loom, weaving the most basic of weave structures, a plain weave (one yarn over one yarn, nothing fancy). I have asked Adam to check out these videos, maybe figure out how they were made, and determine if he can produce something similar. I will work on figuring out how to communicate/demonstrate more complicated structures to Adam. So maybe I should collaborate with Jeanette and Clark on what specific textile pieces we might want to exhibit, and from there, analyze their structures (maybe with the help of Dr.s Anne Tibali and Anne Peters). Then go on to animate more structures.
Ok I promise this is the last paragraph for this post. As Clark and Jeanette already know, the museum has recently received some funding for textile and pottery conservation of this collection (yay!). This will entail relocating some artifacts, and taking them out of storage to carefully unfold and photograph them. We might want to use these images to "dress" people, so computer science people, are there any requirements for the photos that would help with or be necessary for Maya Cloth? We should really only do this photography once so we can handle the fragile pieces as little as possible, so let' s do it right. I will also take that opportunity to take some measurements, and count yarns and maybe come up with some "fun facts" like how many miles, yards, football fields (etc.) of yarn were used to make a particular garment.
Sorry this was so long, again I always appreciate feedback. I have a lot of reading and research to do so you will hear from me again soon. happy holiday weekend!
This paper (which I originally found in the book Making History Interactive from the BAR International Series #2079 edited by Frischer, Crawford, and Koller which is in the lab by my computer if anyone wants to look at it.) is about the author's attempt at a sort of archaeological textile database that can handle large data sets, much like our collection. It is called the Textile Recorder and Visualizer. I looked into his program for a couple reasons. First, I thought it might be a nice way to help organize our data for the textile collection as a whole, and also it seems like it could easily produce nice 3D illustrations of textile structures using basic input data like the dimensions and thread count. This could help with general research and education with less handling of the fragile artifacts, as well as produce some images for the potential exhibit in a timely manor. The program is actually just a wordpress plug-in but unfortunately this author never quite finished his project. My peers here in the lab spent a LOT of time trying to help me install the program yesterday but to no avail (thank you anyway guys!). While the author was able to use his program for 2 datasets, which you can peruse on his website, it seems like he stopped working on it after his paper was due so we were unable to even download the plug-in. He does however invite anyone out there who is interested to contact him and help him complete it.
This was not a total dead-end. The Textile Recorder and Visualizer website did lead me to some more interesting reading. This website is basically the proceedings of 2 conferences on the idea of "virtual touch". I encourage everyone to read through it. I still have to read through a lot of it and I must admit that the idea seems very abstract and difficult to grasp (no pun in tended) right now. The goal is to mimic the experience of touching an object without actually touching it. Obviously this has applications for exhibiting textiles because everyone wants to touch textiles (or is that just me?), but we can not have crowds of people handling archaeological textiles. This also got me thinking about creating a wii-like interactive weaving exhibit. The museum visitor could maybe sit on a stool and look at a screen that shows them sitting at a loom, the person could essentially virtually weave. The resulting virtual cloth could either mimic an object on display, or perhaps the virtual weaver could pick from a few different structures/ yarn colors to design their own cloth.
I have been talking with Adam about animating the weaving process. I found some amazing videos here, on the website for the Royal Ontario Museum. The first animation shows knitting, garment construction, and dressing what appear to be ghosts. The second animation is of dyeing and printing techniques from around the world. The third is an animation of a very basic loom, weaving the most basic of weave structures, a plain weave (one yarn over one yarn, nothing fancy). I have asked Adam to check out these videos, maybe figure out how they were made, and determine if he can produce something similar. I will work on figuring out how to communicate/demonstrate more complicated structures to Adam. So maybe I should collaborate with Jeanette and Clark on what specific textile pieces we might want to exhibit, and from there, analyze their structures (maybe with the help of Dr.s Anne Tibali and Anne Peters). Then go on to animate more structures.
Ok I promise this is the last paragraph for this post. As Clark and Jeanette already know, the museum has recently received some funding for textile and pottery conservation of this collection (yay!). This will entail relocating some artifacts, and taking them out of storage to carefully unfold and photograph them. We might want to use these images to "dress" people, so computer science people, are there any requirements for the photos that would help with or be necessary for Maya Cloth? We should really only do this photography once so we can handle the fragile pieces as little as possible, so let' s do it right. I will also take that opportunity to take some measurements, and count yarns and maybe come up with some "fun facts" like how many miles, yards, football fields (etc.) of yarn were used to make a particular garment.
Sorry this was so long, again I always appreciate feedback. I have a lot of reading and research to do so you will hear from me again soon. happy holiday weekend!
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Practical Purpose Simulation and Grave Lots
In response to Carly's previous post: I enjoy the Lascaux cave reproduction, however, the point of view is odd. I feel like my head is hitting the top of the cave and that I'm flying inside of physically walking throughout the site. Also, it feels like the texture isn't quite solid. For Pachacamac, what sort of sight lines will be looking for? Sometimes looking up at a temple or other building can be effective for psychological purposes, but in order to immerse someone the buildings should be to scale and proportion to their bodies. Therefore, how do you make the same experience for each person? I like the floor from New Zealand idea (once again in response to Carly) and would like to look into it further.
My other concern stems from Carly's idea of projection onto or extremely close to artifacts. Objects shouldn't exposed to too much light, and we need to watch out for any possible conservation issues that way arise from their being around multimedia. However, it would be interesting to toy with the idea of have your typical artifacts on a pedestal with a projection or interactive media behind it on the wall. Then the viewer could look at the artifact and the reproduction at the same time instead of having to crane their necks or look elsewhere in the room.
And now for something old. I admire the look and feel of this still image, made digitally of course. It's something that we've been striving for in this project to give the the look and feel of the site being old even during the Late Horizon (Inka period).
Per a conversation this morning I started looking into military training visualization. The ones that I was actually able to access so far look more like a video game than realistic point of view. Military Training Another interesting use for 3D visualization that I came across was companies that have created virtual reality of their buildings and then simulated catastrophe events (fire, earthquake, etc). While both are interesting applications for virtual reality, they look a little gummy and game-like to me.
Weaving videos. It's proving difficult to find a video of a traditional weaver at work on a backstrap loom in high quality. At about the 2:13 mark of this video I found it easy to follow the process the woman was following and distinguish the different elements.
Finally, parts of today were consumed, and will be consumed, with trying to reconstruct grave lots from Pachacamac. This is one of the more vital aspects that the collection will bring to the visualization of this site and that is the aspect of contextualization. While it seems that I've found one pretty good grave lot (lots of variety, hopefully good preservation, interesting artifacts), I would like to find at least two more that are from different areas of the site in order to have a view from different time periods.
- Jeanette
My other concern stems from Carly's idea of projection onto or extremely close to artifacts. Objects shouldn't exposed to too much light, and we need to watch out for any possible conservation issues that way arise from their being around multimedia. However, it would be interesting to toy with the idea of have your typical artifacts on a pedestal with a projection or interactive media behind it on the wall. Then the viewer could look at the artifact and the reproduction at the same time instead of having to crane their necks or look elsewhere in the room.
And now for something old. I admire the look and feel of this still image, made digitally of course. It's something that we've been striving for in this project to give the the look and feel of the site being old even during the Late Horizon (Inka period).
Per a conversation this morning I started looking into military training visualization. The ones that I was actually able to access so far look more like a video game than realistic point of view. Military Training Another interesting use for 3D visualization that I came across was companies that have created virtual reality of their buildings and then simulated catastrophe events (fire, earthquake, etc). While both are interesting applications for virtual reality, they look a little gummy and game-like to me.
Weaving videos. It's proving difficult to find a video of a traditional weaver at work on a backstrap loom in high quality. At about the 2:13 mark of this video I found it easy to follow the process the woman was following and distinguish the different elements.
Finally, parts of today were consumed, and will be consumed, with trying to reconstruct grave lots from Pachacamac. This is one of the more vital aspects that the collection will bring to the visualization of this site and that is the aspect of contextualization. While it seems that I've found one pretty good grave lot (lots of variety, hopefully good preservation, interesting artifacts), I would like to find at least two more that are from different areas of the site in order to have a view from different time periods.
- Jeanette
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
From Carly - 3 random research leads.
First of all I would like to say that it was wonderful to meet everyone yesterday, and I look forward to getting to know you all better. I am very excited to get this project started!
Check out the beginning of this video, I love the idea of bringing a solid 3D object to life, like how this building wiggles and bends. Imagine a typical artifact-on-a-pedestal, that suddenly comes to life. Perhaps a man made tool shown in use.
I spoke with a friend of mine who has a degree in animation, and he lead me to this video, which is a fly-through of the famous Lascaux caves in France. He is not sure what was used to create it (perhaps autocad?), does anyone know how we could figure out what was used? I think the texture of the caves is rendered beautifully.
As an undergrad I studied abroad in New Zealand and visited the national museum, Te Papa, several times. This is an exhibit that really grabbed my attention every time I visited. The floor of the exhibit is an interactive map of the country, when a person steps on a trigger (geographical point of interest), a lighted path leads to a short informative video on a nearby wall (check out the little video on the right side of the page). I really think they are on to something cool here but I must admit it was always a little chaotic and hard to focus in that gallery.
I'd love to hear some feedback on any of these!
- Carly
Check out the beginning of this video, I love the idea of bringing a solid 3D object to life, like how this building wiggles and bends. Imagine a typical artifact-on-a-pedestal, that suddenly comes to life. Perhaps a man made tool shown in use.
I spoke with a friend of mine who has a degree in animation, and he lead me to this video, which is a fly-through of the famous Lascaux caves in France. He is not sure what was used to create it (perhaps autocad?), does anyone know how we could figure out what was used? I think the texture of the caves is rendered beautifully.
As an undergrad I studied abroad in New Zealand and visited the national museum, Te Papa, several times. This is an exhibit that really grabbed my attention every time I visited. The floor of the exhibit is an interactive map of the country, when a person steps on a trigger (geographical point of interest), a lighted path leads to a short informative video on a nearby wall (check out the little video on the right side of the page). I really think they are on to something cool here but I must admit it was always a little chaotic and hard to focus in that gallery.
I'd love to hear some feedback on any of these!
- Carly
Monday, May 23, 2011
Day One (5/23)
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: amazing interactive projections. His use of washing out the projections with a bright light and the pictures being “revealed” by the viewer’s shadows is brilliant.
Immersive Interactive Virtual Reality in the Museum by Maria Roussou. Informative on a straight forward level, but didn't provide any new information.
Virtual Reality installation art that is only accessible from a phone (Android, iPhone) when standing at the site: http://thefamilyvacationist.blogspot.com/2011/04/virtual-reality-art-projects-for.html
I can't take credit for this one, Carly found it first. Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan. Interactive/Immersive Exhibit at the Sackler Gallery, DC: http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/xiangtangshan.asp
- Jeanette
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