Aliya Hoff

MediaCommons Framework: An Immersive Storytelling Platform and Exodus

Scientific storytelling can be utilized to effectively convey research by synthesizing media-based data sets within a narrative frame. The “MediaCommons Framework” (MCF) was developed to efficiently integrate high-resolution media via cluster display systems for immersive, collaborative visualization. By incorporating temporal, spatial, and audio localization components into a wide-range of high-resolution media types, the MediaCommons Framework provides an ideal platform for scientific storytelling as it offers a coherent view of contextualized data, imparting a more engaging and intelligible experience to the public. As a case study, we describe our experiences using the framework to develop a storytelling application for the 2013 EX3: Exodus, Cyber-archaeology, and the Future digital museum exhibit. The use of the MCF within EX3 demonstrates the significance of advanced visualization in archaeology and the exigency to advance cyber-archaeological and other transdisciplinary research endeavors. This chapter’s focus is on the technology used during the Exodus exhibit to convey stories to an audience within a museum-like environment. It includes high-level technical details about the framework used, our experiences developing and using storytelling applications for tiled-display walls, and the outcome of the public events these applications were used in. The experiences mentioned in this chapter are from the points of view of the framework’s developers, exhibit content creators and managers, as well as archaeologists who have had the chance to use the applications to tell their stories to their targeted audience. This research embodies the ancient World Building methodology outlined in Seldess et al. (Chap. 11).

Airborne imaging for cultural heritage

We present our work in designing and deploying airborne sensor vehicles specifically for cultural heritage applications. Numerous practical cultural heritage missions in survey, assessment, and conservation work can benefit from the utility of specializing commodity and customizable airborne platforms to collect visual and non-visual data. These systems and customizations therein have undergone several generations of development both in our own designs and in the research community at large. We discuss the historical application of airborne imaging to cultural heritage conservation and surveying as well as discuss the design evolution towards multi-rotor systems from conventional rotary-wing and fixed-wing systems. This discussion addresses the fundamental principles of operation, as well as the capabilities, contemporary methods and commodity components available for the implementation of such a system. We present our current system and its features in concert with example payloads of utility in conducting these practical reconnaissance missions, as well as useful post-processing techniques, as well as future work in applied visualization.

MediaCommons for cultural heritage: Applied mixed media visualization storytelling for high resolution collaborative cyberarchaeological displays

Archaeology is a discipline that studies time through an understanding of space and objects in that space; archaeology is ultimately, therefore, an intersection where the visualization of space and the visualization of time meet. Archaeology has long utilized visualization as a technique to analyze and disseminate information; however, comprehensive and collaborative analysis and storytelling with this visual data has always been limited by the capacity of the systems, which create and display it. To present the most complete narrative of the past, one must seek the “big picture” by assembling the disparate pieces of data, which reflect the lives of the humans we study. This paper presents a framework for the visualization of and interaction with rich data collections in high resolution, networked, tiled-display environments, called the MediaCommons Framework.