I-CHASS|WED 7/30 Part I

On Wednesday morning Michael Meredith didn’t stay as long as usual at the group's breakfast table. He wanted to get ready for his demo of Virtual Vellum, starting at 9AM sharp.

Meredith is a great (and easy to comprehend) communicator. I wish that more CS folks were like him...:) Even in something as serious as Illuminated French and Belgian Medieval Manuscripts, he finds a way to make things fun such as by calling "Manuscripts Torture Chamber" to the room where his team at the University of Sheffield carefully manipulates the rare documents.

The illustrations were beautiful - most pages we analyzed were of manuscripts from Besançon.

Screenshot of Virtual Vellum showing one page of an Illuminated manuscript of Besançon

What I liked about Virtual Vellum is that - besides the download time that my laptop required to open each manuscript page - the interface was very clear, making use of icons and metaphors that are "readable" even for non historians like myself. The waiting time, by the way, was a personal problem: the download time needed by normal laptops (not the case of mine…) was perfectly reasonable.

The demo available on the site has very easy instructions to follow. I include a transcription from the Panoply website next just to prove my point:

"Explore a selection of manuscript images from our online database! Click on one of the thumbnails below to load an image of an illuminated folio (depending on your network connection speed, this may take a few seconds) into the Virtual Vellum applet to the right-hand side. It can then be explored via the toolbar." [Quote from Panoply website] 

The Humanities scholars in the room had some interesting questions on language - whether the software was able to translate from Portuguese to French for example - and the answer was "no, not yet". However the pages could be "read" - graphic on one window and corresponding text on another - though that process implied a complex algorithm involving the positioning of elements on the page. Too complex to describe here ... (ahem...) Meredith also demoed "Kiosque" (similar to Virtual Vellum but where the main objective is the display rather than the analysis - and this is an over-simplification of course) and "The Chronicles of Froissart", which some of us were lucky enough to get in DVD to take home!

After Meredith's demo session we had coffee and when we got back Alan Craig was already at the podium with his webcam and fiducial cards to demo an accessible, cheap but F U N way of experimenting with augmented reality.

One of Crag's slides was, for me, the highlight of the whole week. It was the image of a little girl reading... the book was open and showed a 3D scene of the US Civil War as if soldiers and horses were coming out of the book. The image was of course Photoshopped (put together by Dave Bock, whom I hope to meet!) but Craig said -"This is what we are trying to do". And when you hear Craig say that it really sounds like it is going to happen tomorrow! I think that was the most beautiful proof of concept I have ever seen... A little girl with her book coming alive!

Craig made a fly land on a sheet of paper he was holding, and a cartoon character react flexing one leg then the other - inverse kinematics - to the way Craig was tilting a sheet of paper. The AR stuff that Craig demoed was based on open source ARToolkit.

The cartoon character movie was from HitlabNZ, at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, directed by Mark Billinghurst. This Lab is focused on creating one of the largest (or the largest) AR teams worldwide, along with the support of Media Power. Craig exemplified a great ping-pong game with cell phones developed at the NZ Lab - complicated to do in the US where phone companies do not want to open their code - and stressed how Billinghurst and his team have been doing tremendous advances in AR for mobile devices.

Last but not least, we saw a video of an SL+AR experiment (also from the NZ Lab) where fiducial cards were being used to pass one... huh... human-shaped element (for lack of a better , more informed word)  from real life to Second Life and back. Creepy!

During all these demos Craig was amused by our "Wows" and said that AR has this magic power of being very spectacular. However, what they need (Craig's team, which includes Bob McGrath) are ideas of how to use this technology in education. They are counting on us for that.

Caption: Alan Craig, Robert McGrath, Ana Boa-Ventura and Michael Meredith posing by the plaque at the entrance of NCSA commemorating the creation of the Mosaic web browser by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessenor
or
"Yours truly hoping that IQ is transmissible"

Craig showed us some AR projects from Georgia Tech namely:

- 4AM (4 Angry Men) based in Sidney Lumet's "Twelve Angry Men". In this AR environment, the viewer/user becomes a participant by sitting in one chair in a physical space representing the jury room. The user witnesses the drama from the viewpoint of one of four jurors.

- an AR environment for Alice in Wonderland where the user/viewer gets to interact with Alice, the Rabbit and several other characters. 

These environments propose AR experimentations around interactive storytelling, so this definitely caught my attention!

Craig is an amazing scientist who has worked with data mining, visual representation of data, multimodal representation of data, virtual reality and augmented reality. Several years back, I was forcing my students in the Portuguese University where I lectured to read his book on Virtual Reality. Not much forcing needed though, as the book is well written and easy to follow, and the examples fascinating. Initially I had not realized that the Alan I was going to hear was *the* Alan Craig. So that became sort of a private joke between the two of us. In the captions for my FLickR photo collection for this event I identify him as "the Alan Craig"...

We would see Craig again in the afternoon who guided us through several VR environments in the CAVE. Again, he was amused by our excitement over a technology that was roughly 15 years old (but still fun and full of potential).