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By Dimitra Papageorgiou, Nikos Ioannidis, Ioannis Christou, Michael Papathomas and Markellos Diorinos - July 2000
Dimitra Papageorgiou, Nikos Ioannidis, Ioannis Christou, Michael Papathomas and Markellos Diorinos discuss the ARCHEOGUIDE project [1]. The project aim is to develop a system that enhances the overall experience of a visitor to a cultural heritage site by providing an augmented reality (AR) reconstruction of the ruins of the site’s monuments. The system will act as a personalised guide providing multimedia and new media information to visitors. ARCHEOGUIDE takes into account visitor's personal preferences and continuously adapts the tour according to their interaction with the system. The authors give a brief description of the project, the way the system will be applied and its overall architecture [2].
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Europe is a major contributor to cultural heritage. Due to its long history it contains a large number of archeological sites, monuments and museums indicating its contribution to human civilization. Lots of people are visiting cultural heritage sites all around Europe [3], most of which cannot exhibit anything but ruins of the original site and therefore fail to transfer to visitors the true cultural function of the site. ARCHEOGUIDE is an Augmented Reality based system that will try to integrate cultural sites with 3D reconstructions and other multimedia information so that the original function of the site can be better communicated to visitors. ARCHEOGUIDE also permits the diversification of the visitors to be taken into account by allowing them to enter information about their personal preferences and then by continuously adapting the presented material to the user profile during the visit.
In order to provide this wealth of structured new-media information to the visitor, a rigorous database model will be developed that can serve both site visitors (for guided tours) and scientists, by providing complete and thorough site documentation.
Funded by the EU IST framework, the consortium consists of: Intracom S.A. (Greece), Fraunhofer Institute of Computer Graphics (IGD) (Germany), the Computer Graphics Centre (ZGDV) (Germany), the Centro de Computacao Graphica (CCG) (Portugal), A&C 2000 (Italy), Post Reality (Greece) and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture (Greece).
The project technical objectives are:
The business objectives of the project include:
The ARCHEOGIDE project will provide a new approach to visits in cultural heritage sites by overcoming the disadvantages that physical or virtual tours have.
In the case of traditional on-site tours the visitors are grouped and led around the grounds whilst all receiving the same pieces of information about the site. A small amount of interaction with the human guide is possible but the visitors all share the same tour; which has been constructed to be less specialized and general in order to meet the needs of a wide area of visitors. In fact it is well known that guided tours in cultural heritage sites often cause boredom because of their stiff, inflexible and generalized material and presentation.
Virtual reality guides in contrast are systems where the users experience a visit in a cultural site without being physically present. Instead they enter a virtual environment that represents the physical archaeological site along with 3D reconstructions of monuments. During the virtual tour they are presented with multimedia information about the site in response to choices made by them.
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| Figure 1. Augmented reality |
The ARCHEOGUIDE system is an augmented reality on-site guide. This means that it overlays virtual objects on to the physical environment of a cultural heritage site. In consequence, visitors will be able to be present in an archaeological site by carrying a mobile unit and wearing a see-through HMD (Head Mounted Display) with headphones, which will compose the natural environment by a 3D reconstruction of ruins and monuments. The mobile unit will be connected to a server that contains a database with the complete site documentation and models. The system will create a user profile at the beginning of the tour according to visitor’s personal features and will present to each user corresponding information selected from the server’s database. The visitor will then walk around the place directed by the system’s instructions in the same way they would follow a human guide. He/she will be able to interact with the system through a friendly interface by asking questions which will continually change the presentation to meet his/her interests.
The ARCHEOGUIDE project will aim to make visits to cultural heritage sites more interesting and compelling by allowing to view a reconstruction of the monuments as they actually were when built. Visitors will also follow an instructed tour, hearing information that is personalised, and have access to a large database containing site documentation including historical and scientific information.
The visitors will be provided with a mobile unit and a see-through HMD will be connected together as soon as they enter the site. The mobile unit will contain the information to be presented and the HMD will display the physical environment and 3D virtual objects. The HMD will be equipped with headphones through which audio information about the site will be presented. At the beginning of the tour the visitors will be asked to provide personal information about themselves, such as age, education, special interests etc. so that the system can construct a profile. According to that profile a list of predefined-tours will be suggested to the user and he/she will make a choice or modify the predefined tour meeting his/her preferences. The path the visitor will follow will be drawn up by ARCHEOGUIDE detailing the monuments and route the tour will take. The visitor will be able to add/delete objects from that tour and receive information only on subjects that interest him/her. The information presented about each individual object will also depend on the user’s profile; for example different information will be available for a child than for an adult.
The visitor will then follow the system’s instructions in order to visit the site. The site will be divided into areas and sub areas with relevant spatial content. The tour will begin by giving general information about the areas and then will continue by concentrating on each individual monument. 3D reconstructions of objects and multimedia information will be displayed in the visitor’s HMD.
The visitor will be able to interact with the system during the tour by asking questions which will in turn update the tour. The user will be able to ask for more information about certain subjects, choose an object of interest about which he/she requires presentation and stop/pause/resume the presentation through a user-friendly interface. More advanced search capabilities will also be available allowing the user to find cultural information about monuments, historic events, scientific aspects and any information related to a monument, subject, historic period.
It is the unique structure and organisation of the tour that allows a consistent and coherent story to be presented during the tour whilst preserving personalization. A tour consists of a number of "scripts", one for each area of the tour. Each script is an ordered array of multimedia objects to be presented. A multimedia object may be an image, a 3D model, an audio file containing information about an object or a monument or a combination of the above. However, the script may also contain "expandable multimedia objects" which can be thought of as abstract objects having many derived implementations. Two different visitors who have selected the same tour will be presented with different multimedia information according to their individual preferences stated at the beginning of the tour. This structure allows both consistency and coherency throughout the tour because the core of the tour remains unchanged (and un-restructured), but also allows flexibility and personalization by providing different content (focusing on different aspects or topics) at key points of the tour selected by the content creator or curator. In a sense, this structure resembles a web page containing multimedia information and instantly expanding hyperlinks that contain different information for each visitor.
The system architecture is illustrated below:
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| Figure 2. ARCHEOGUIDE Overall Architecture |
The system consists of the following:
The ARCHEOGUIDE system is based on client/server architecture which includes a Site Information server containing the Database that holds complete scientific documentation of the site, the spatial information, the 3D representations of objects and the audio-visual presentations targeting the visitors.
The mobile units are portable computers with a see-through HMD (Head Mounted Display) equipped with a camera and speaker. The HMD augments the real scene received by the camera with the virtual representations of objects and presents the audio information. The mobile units will maintain a local database that will store a subset of the site information pertaining to a particular area of the site for a particular user and visit profile. As the user moves around the site the mobile units communicate with the site information server to download information relevant to the new area of the site the user has entered.
The mobile units communicate with the site information server through a wireless network. The wireless network will consist of small number of access points transferring database information from the server to the client (mobile unit). Wireless LANs use radio frequency (RF) technology to transmit and receive data over the air, avoiding the need for wired connections. In a typical wireless LAN configuration a transmitter/receiver (transceiver) device called an access point, connects to the wired network. At a minimum, the access point receives, buffers, and transmits data between the wireless LAN and the wired network infrastructure. A single access point can support a small group of users ranging from 15-50.
The mobile unit also contains a position and orientation tracking system. A Global Positioning System (GPS) will be used as a first order position tracker, feeding a much more advanced image based position and orientation tracking system that will search for recognizable landmarks in the image provided by the user camera. The GPS will serve two purposes: to restrict the number of recognizable landmarks the system searches for in the camera image, and to maintain at least an approximate position tracking information at all times. The position tracking system of a user will transmit I/O requests to the server whenever it determines that the visitor is moving to an area about which there is no information in the local database of the computer of the Mobile Unit.
ARCHEOGUIDE is a research project pursued by a consortium of European organisations that are funded by the European Union IST framework. The system will fuse together a number of diverse cutting edge technologies such as augmented reality, multi-modal user interaction, multimedia databases and geographic information systems, distributed OO computing, and machine learning in order for visitors of cultural heritage sites to have a completely new experience. It will be an adaptive, interactive personalized tour of the site that will excite all major human senses. The first installation site of this project will be ancient Olympia in Greece, the birthplace of the Olympic games and from where the Olympic light begins its journey to the host city of the games every four years. Bearing in mind that the Olympic games in 2004 will take place in Athens, Greece, the importance of this system becomes even greater.
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Dimitra Papageorgiou, Nikos
Ioannidis, Ioannis Christou,
Michael Papathomas and Markellos
Diorinos
Development Programmes Dept.
Intracom S.A.
Peania, Greece
nioa@intranet.gr
Dimitra Papageorgiou, Software Engineer works in the software development of ARCHEOGUIDE project
Nikos Ioannidis, Deputy Manager of the Development Programs Department is the overall manager of the ARCHEOGUIDE project.
Dr. Ioannis Christou, Project Coordinator is responsible for the design and integration of ARCHEOGUIDE project.
Dr. Michael Papathomas, was responsible for writing the initial proposal of the project.
Markellos Diorinos, Software Engineer works in the software development of the project.
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For citation purposes:
Papageorgiou,D. Ioannidis,N. Christou,I. Papathomas,M. & Diorinos,M. "ARCHEOGUIDE: An Augmented Reality based System for Personalized Tours in Cultural Heritage Sites.", Cultivate Interactive, issue
1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/archeo/>
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