Alessandra Setti

Interactive, Tangible and Multi-sensory Technology for a Cultural Heritage Exhibition: The Battle of Pavia

New generation multimedia may have a great impact on exhibition visit experience. This contribution focuses on the innovative use of interactive digital technologies in cultural heritage practices. “Live” displays steered by visitors support the creation of various content formats, smartly adapt the content delivered to the visitor, stimulate self-motivated learning, and lead to a memorable and effective experience. Multimodal interaction modalities have been developed for the exhibition “1525–2015. Pavia, the Battle, the Future. Nothing was the same again”, a satellite event of the Universal Exhibition in Milan (Expo 2015). The Computer Vision & Multimedia Lab of the University of Pavia, in cooperation with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, in the framework of the European project “Advanced Computing for Innovation”, has contributed to set up the exhibition, enriching an educational and experiential room with products and targeted applications. Visitors can observe and analyze seven ancient tapestries, illustrating different phases of the battle, through 3D reconstructions, virtual simulations, eye interaction and gesture navigation, along with transpositions of the tapestries into tactile images that enable the exploration by partially sighted and blind people. In the near future, we may assess the impact of this interactive experience. Due to the novelty of the approach, new insights can be potentially derived about the effectiveness and manageability of each specific system component. Under this scope, not only the exhibition success is important, but also the augmented learning experience in cultural heritage contexts.

Exploiting a Graphical Braille Display for Art Masterpieces

A new graphical Braille display is presented. Its use, social value and advantages are discussed. In particular is developed an approach allowing objects of cultural and historical heritage to be presented in an intuitive and accessible way to low-sighted or blind people.

Image Segmentation Scrutiny by Eye Tracking

Among the visual functionalities the most popular investigations refer to free viewing scan-paths, controlled fixation in visual search in the form of task-driven (top-down) visual guidance, priming mechanisms i.e. The procedural changes when target and distract or features are repeated on consecutive trials, and stimulus-driven (bottom-up) analysis mainly of simple artificial images, with discrete search items features, but rarely on ordinary real life scenes. Here we are pointing out a different task derived directly from the image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision communities: boundary detection. Starting with simple, artificial images composed of two segments with discrete items characterized by just one or two features (in this case having target and distracters sharing one of them or both but differing by their combination), or more complex scene in which segmentation can produce different image interpretations such as in classical ambiguous pictures. A first preliminary, qualitative analysis, based on a limited set of about ten images and observers, is here discussed.

Art Masterpieces Accessibility for Blind and Visually Impaired People

A new representation of content for haptic exploration of two-dimensional pictorial art masterpieces is presented. To realize a “tactile image”, pictures must be simplified and converted to a bas-relief with distinct and logically homogeneous areas, so that each segment can convey the original content in an intelligible way. Pictures must be digitized, modified, adapted and reconstructed as 3D models that are finally processed by a 3D printer to get an object analyzable through fingertips. We assess the quality and efficiency of the proposed solution through a cooperation with the Italian Union of Blind and Visually Impaired People. The resulting representations were implemented in two different events, gathering visitors’ comments. Remarks obtained during the exhibition in Pavia in 2015 led to a version of a tactile image that is now shown in Milan, at the Pinacoteca di Brera, beside the original masterpiece. The collected comments confirm that the approach is appreciated.

Panel Summary: Think About This: is Thinking Necessary to do Actions?

When Virginio Cantoni, Vito Di Gesu, and one of the authors (JDB), in a very creative meeting in Palermo, decided about the title of this panel discussion, the original formulation simply was: Is thinking necessary?