Virtual reality (VR) started about 50 years ago in a form we would recognize today [stereo head-mounted display (HMD), head tracking, computer graphics generated images] – although the hardware was completely different. In the 1980s and 1990s, VR emerged again based on a different generation of hardware (e.g., CRT displays rather than vector refresh, electromagnetic tracking instead of mechanical). This reached the attention of the public, and VR was hailed by many engineers, scientists, celebrities, and business people as the beginning of a new era, when VR would soon change the world for the better. Then, VR disappeared from public view and was rumored to be “dead.” In the intervening 25 years a huge amount of research has nevertheless been carried out across a vast range of applications – from medicine to business, from psychotherapy to industry, from sports to travel. Scientists, engineers, and people working in industry carried on with their research and applications using and exploring different forms of VR, not knowing that actually the topic had already passed away. The purpose of this article is to survey a range of VR applications where there is some evidence for, or at least debate about, its utility, mainly based on publications in peer-reviewed journals. Of course not every type of application has been covered, nor every scientific paper (about 186,000 papers in Google Scholar): in particular, in this review we have not covered applications in psychological or medical rehabilitation. The objective is that the reader becomes aware of what has been accomplished in VR, where the evidence is weaker or stronger, and what can be done. We start in Section 1 with an outline of what VR is and the major conceptual framework used to understand what happens when people experience it – the concept of “presence.” In Section 2, we review some areas where VR has been used in science – mostly psychology and neuroscience, the area of scientific visualization, and some remarks about its use in education and surgical training. In Section 3, we discuss how VR has been used in sports and exercise. In Section 4, we survey applications in social psychology and related areas – how VR has been used to throw light on some social phenomena, and how it can be used to tackle experimentally areas that cannot be studied experimentally in real life. We conclude with how it has been used in the preservation of and access to cultural heritage. In Section 5, we present the domain of moral behavior, including an example of how it might be used to train professionals such as medical doctors when confronting serious dilemmas with patients. In Section 6, we consider how VR has been and might be used in various aspects of travel, collaboration, and industry. In Section 7, we consider mainly the use of VR in news presentation and also discuss different types of VR. In the concluding Section 8, we briefly consider new ideas that have recently emerged – an impossible task since during the short time we have written this page even newer ideas have emerged! And, we conclude with some general considerations and speculations. Throughout and wherever possible we have stressed novel applications and approaches and how the real power of VR is not necessarily to produce a faithful reproduction of “reality” but rather that it offers the possibility to step outside of the normal bounds of reality and realize goals in a totally new and unexpected way. We hope that our article will provoke readers to think as paradigm changers, and advance VR to realize different worlds that might have a positive impact on the lives of millions of people worldwide, and maybe even help a little in saving the planet.
The use of interactive storytelling by museums and heritage sites lends to the creation of experiences that support visitors in engaging emotionally with the objects on display. Finding ways to connect to the cultural content is even more important for visitors of archaeological sites due to the often fragmentary nature of the exhibits, which can leave them wondering what was once there and how it relates to them. In this paper, we describe the creation of a prototype mobile storytelling experience that attempts to explore a more emotive kind of storytelling in cultural contexts. The prototype was evaluated in a preliminary study that took place at the archaeological site of the Ancient Agora of Athens. The observations provide insights for the design of future iterations of such emotive storytelling experiences.
Public history and participatory history initiatives are rapidly gaining momentum as they aim to democratize the historical narrative, involving communities and individuals in shaping their own historical experiences. This paper introduces a novel approach to these accomplishments by harnessing the power of the Social Simulacra Model. The model offers an innovative and participatory framework for public history projects, enabling individuals to actively engage with and contribute to historical narratives. By integrating the Social Simulacra Model into public history, this paper seeks to transform the traditional approach to historical storytelling. This model facilitates the creation of immersive, interactive historical simulations that enable participants to become part of the historical landscape. It fosters a deeper connection between individuals and the past by allowing them to take on roles, explore social dynamics, and make decisions within historical contexts. This paper also illustrates the potential of the Social Simulacra Model in enriching public history and participatory history projects by offering a new dimension of engagement and interaction with the past. It paves the way for a more inclusive, engaging, and participatory approach to historical storytelling, bridging the gap between academic history and public engagement.
The costs of walking (Cw) and running (Cr) were measured on 10 runners on a treadmill inclined between −0.45 to +0.45 at different speeds. The minimum Cw was 1.64 ± 0.50 J · kg−1 · m−1 at a 1.0 ± 0.3 m/s speed on the level. It increased on positive slopes, attained 17.33 ± 1.11 J · kg−1 · m−1 at +0.45, and was reduced to 0.81 ± 0.37 J · kg−1 · m−1 at −0.10. At steeper slopes, it increased to reach 3.46 ± 0.95 J · kg−1 · m−1 at −0.45. Cr was 3.40 ± 0.24 J · kg−1 · m−1 on the level, independent of speed. It increased on positive slopes, attained 18.93 ± 1.74 J · kg−1 · m−1 at +0.45, and was reduced to 1.73 ± 0.36 J · kg−1 · m−1 at −0.20. At steeper slopes, it increased to reach 3.92 ± 0.81 J · kg−1 · m−1 at −0.45. The mechanical efficiencies of walking and running above +0.15 and below −0.15 attained those of concentric and eccentric muscular contraction, respectively. The optimum gradients for mountain paths approximated 0.20–0.30 for both gaits. Downhill, Cr was some 40% lower than reported in the literature for sedentary subjects. The estimated maximum running speeds on positive gradients corresponded to those adopted in uphill races; on negative gradients they were well above those attained in downhill competitions.
This paper describes the main challenges faced and the solutions adopted in the frame of the project DASI – Digital archive for the study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions. In particular, it discusses the methodological and technological issues that emerged during the conversion from the CSAI – Corpus of South Arabian inscriptions project (a domain-specific, text-based, digital edition conceived at the end of 1990s) to the wider DASI archive for the study of inscriptions in different languages and scripts of ancient Arabia. The paper devotes special attention to: the modelling of data and encoding (XML annotation vs database approach; the conceptual model for the valorisation of the material aspect of the epigraph; the textual encoding for critical editions); interoperability (pros and cons of compliance to standards; harmonization of metadata; openness; semantic interoperability); lexicography (tools for under-resourced languages; translations), with a view to possibly fostering reasoning on best practices in the community of digital epigraphers beyond each specific cultural/
The encoding of the spatial-temporal archeological, historical and anthropological records can be considered an ideal-typical representation of the human reasoning and thus also an artificial membrane interposed between the researcher and the past. These membranes are here considered artificial networks and can undergo interrogation processes through the most advanced analytical tools for learning and modeling complex configurations. The aim of this paper is to synthesize recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science and - at the same time - to support the connectionists and symbolic computational paradigms as a new epistemic frontier in the automatic annotation of tangible and intangible heritage as well in the contemporary theories and methods of the archeological thought.
The open science movement is promising to revolutionise the way science is conducted with the goal to make it more fair, solid and democratic. This revolution is destined to remain just a wish if it is not supported by changes in culture and practices as well as in enabling technologies. This paper describes the D4Science offerings to enact open science-friendly Virtual Research Environments. In particular, the paper describes how complete solutions suitable for realising open science practices can be achieved by integrating a social networking collaborative environment with a shared workspace, an open data analytics platform, and a catalogue enabling to effectively find, access and reuse every research artefact.
The assessment of perceived risk by people is extremely important for safety and security management. Each person is based on the opinion of others to make a choice and the Internet represents the place where these opinions are mostly researched, found and reviewed. Social networks have a decisive impact: 92% of consumers say they have more trust in social media reviews than in any other form of advertising. For this reason, Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis have found interesting applications in the most diverse context, among which the most innovative is certainly represented by public safety and security. Security managers can use the perceptions expressed by people to discover the unexpected and potential weaknesses of a controlled environment or otherwise the risk and security perception of people that sometimes can be very different from real level of risk and security of a given site. Since the perceptions are the result of mostly unconscious elaborations, it is necessary to go deeper and to search for the emotions, triggered by the sensorial stimuli, that determine them. The objective of this paper is to study the perception of risk within the Pompeii Archaeological Park, giving emphasis to the emotional components, using the semantic analysis of the textual contents present in Twitter.
The collection of stratigraphic data has been done for years with offline tools like the Microsoft Access software, which was considered a user-friendly tool with the ability to print standardised context sheets (like the Italian ministerial US sheets) directly and ‘without’ the need for technical expertise. It is well known to the scientific community the limitation inherent in this type of approach: the data is not shared online and is not easy to be collaboratively edited; the data is locked within a proprietary format with repercussions on medium- to long-term preservation; and it is not immediately possible to integrate the data with other projects due to a lack of precise reference standard. Despite these issues, the offline approach remained viable in a whole range of situations where it is necessary to have a fast and easy-to-manage database. This contribution starts from the hypothesis that an offline standardised and encapsulated tool in an open format (such as SQLite, LibreOffice Base or MySQL), editable with open source software, can offer additional solution because it is easy to use and disseminate in the form of a free, downloadable template. EMdb aims to collect and manage not only stratigraphic data but also reconstructive unit sheets to cover the need to analyse, interpret and validate scientific hypotheses in the field.
Today, the satellite-based monitoring of archaeological sites and site damage is a widespread practice, especially in conflict-affected regions. However, the vast majority of these remote sensing cultural heritage monitoring efforts have been led and conducted by remote researchers, and there remains an urgent need to embed this work within existing, in-country institutions at local and regional levels. Here, we present the archaeological site monitoring approach and results from the project Archaeological Practice and Heritage Protection in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq , a collaborative project between the Sirwan Regional Project and Kurdish Iraqi archaeologists aimed at generating a fully functional and sustainable programme of archaeological site management co-created with, and managed by, Kurdish Iraqi archaeologists and antiquities officials. Between August 2018 and February 2020, 376 archaeological sites in the Sirwan/Upper Diyala River Valley region, located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, were assessed for damage by Kurdish Iraqi archaeologists in collaboration with the Sirwan Regional Project. This work represents the first large-scale, systematic dataset of archaeological site conditions and longer-term damage in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). Our results show that 86.7% of the assessed archaeological sites and 38.6% of the site surface area in this region were affected by damage between 1951–2018, and demonstrate the great urgency with which action must be taken to develop appropriate safeguarding measures for the KRI’s archaeological heritage. On the basis of these results, we outline relevant recommendations for the immediate protection of archaeological sites in Garmian and the greater Kurdistan Region.
Extended Matrix 3D tools (EMTools) is a Python-based addon that brings the formal language Extended Matrix within the Blender 3D open-source software. It has been designed and developed by E. Demetrescu (CNR-ISPC, former ITABC) and is part of the Extended Matrix Framework (EMF). With EMtools users can import, manage, visualize, modify, represent and export all the information (geometries, data and paradata) concerning micro and macro scale contexts, single objects or collections of objects. The EMtools user manual is freely available. The original GitHub repository of EM-tools can be found here Channel to join the community of users Telegram open-group For more details see the EM-tools page on the EM website Main features: * Integration of Extended Matrix language with Blender * Full support to create and visualize reconstruction hypotheses (EM reconstructive workflow) * Full support to annotate archaeological stratigraphy in 3D (EM archaeological workflow) * Full support to annotate masonry stratigraphy (EM architectonical survey workflow) * Export full dataset to ATON 3 (EMviq app) Changelog of EM-tools 1.3.2 full support of EM 1.3 a refactored export panel targeting Aton 3-based web apps (like EMviq) with tools to easily optimise models for web visualisation; The original GitHub repository of the EM formal language can be found here Channel to join the community of users Telegram open-group For more details see the EM-tools page on the EM website Contribute to EM-tools You are more than welcome to contribute to the project by spotting bugs/issues and providing code or solutions through pull requests to fix or improve EM-tools features. Use the aforementioned original Git Hub repository for collaborative editing.
La lexicographie naturelle qui vise à observer certains faits concernant les occurrences de mots dans une langue donnée (glossaires, thesaurus), se définit par opposition à la lexicographie documentaire qui aboutit à une liste de termes organisés ou non, destinés à l'indexation automatique ou non, et dont les classifications sont un groupe parmi d'autres. Le fondement des classifications peut être d'organisation sémantique (ordre des termes fondé sur l'essence des entités qu'ils désignent, le cas-limite étant la taxinomie), ou d'organisation syntaxique (ordre des termes fondé sur la fonction des entités dans un champ d'observation déterminé, le cas-limite étant la facette)
This paper consists of some notes and comments on the use of electronic information systems in archaeology, in the form of stating a number of theses, each followed by an explanation and/or defence. Most of the theses pertain to the relationship among research design, relational database management system and geographical information system. The last section of the paper shortly discusses some projects in which electronic information systems are being used.
