Digital Cultural Heritage

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 biographies

Professor Donna J. Cox, MFA, PhD, is professor in the School of Art and Design, Director of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL), Director for Research & Education, and Culture & Society at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Cox is an internationally acclaimed computer artist, designer, writer, and recognised ground-breaker in scientific and data visualisation. She coined the term “Renaissance Teams” to describe interdisciplinary teams who address grand challenges. AVL develops advanced technologies including virtual reality for design, insight, discovery, and to captivate the broad public with the stories of natural phenomenon. She and her collaborators have thrilled millions around the world with stunning cinematic presentations of data for giant-screen productions, digital museum shows, and television documentaries. She was art director of scientific visualisation for the Academy Award nominated IMAX film, Cosmic Voyage, 1997.  AVL contributed major scenes to the IMAX film, Hubble 3D which was honored with three giant screen awards for best picture, choreography, and life-long learning, 2010.  AVL’s latest popular productions include A Beautiful Planet IMAX 3D movie, 2016, narrated by Jennifer Lawrence. The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry selected Cox as one of 40 modern-day Leonardo DaVinci’s. She is honored with the first Michael Aiken Endowed Chair at Illinois. In February 2017, the IMERSA international organisation awarded Cox with a lifetime achievement award for lasting and positive contributions to the digital dome and big screen community. In March 2018, she received the Innovation Transfer Award—University of Illinois in recognition of her work with the potential for significant societal impact. She is the lead co-editor on art historical book New Media Futures: the rise of women in the digital arts, 2018.

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. As a self-taught programmer with a background in design and theory, he bridges the gap between the Cypriot architectural-archeological team and the NCSA's Advanced Visualization Lab. Under mentors Donna Cox and Georgios Artopoulos, Colter builds systems for accessing cultural heritage and artefacts through emerging virtual and augmented-reality platforms. His research explores digital cultural heritage, critical technology theory, and informatic systems for the built environment. In his time as an NCSA intern, Colter has worked on designing and implementing a GUI system, VR interaction model, and data recording/management for RIVEEL3D application for analysis and exploration of historical Cypriot environments and artefacts. This has involved devising a software pipeline for translating photogrammetric and lidar data between an archeology database into a real time visualization engine built around the Unity game engine, and documenting and instructing researchers in the use of the software. His current research is investigating creating and programming functional systems which blend the built world with the digital to create an enhanced­-but-­honest expression of human knowledge, history, sensation and thought.

AJ Christensen is a visualisation programmer in the Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He is a hybrid programmer and visual designer with a background in computer science, animation, and science communication. As part of the AVL, he focuses on scene design of the team’s cinematic visualiaations of supercomputer data using Hollywood visual effects tools like Maya and Houdini. This often involves manipulating and formatting scientific data externally and deriving new data using techniques like particle advection and volume analysis. He develops computer graphics algorithms and shaders to highlight important features in scientific datasets, to optimies design speed and workflow, and to refine organic immersive environments. AJ has contributed to the IMAX films "Hubble 3D" and "A Beautiful Planet", as well as digital fulldome shows like "Dynamic Earth" and "Solar Superstorms". In addition to his film credits with the AVL, he contributed to the science-inspired renderings of a black hole in the Christopher Nolan film "Interstellar" with effects studio Double Negative. AJ is a volunteer for the computer graphics professional organisation ACM SIGGRAPH where he is the vice chair for the international chapters program and the 2019 chair of the conference Posters venue. He is also a cofounder of the local Champaign-Urbana Film Society where he helped launch a K-12 screenwriting competition where local filmmakers turn some of their favorite submissions into actual movies.

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