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From Visible Past: A Geographic Wiki Collaborative Environment based on 3d historical models. Location aware system that interacts with CAVE sysstems, Google Earth and WorldWind. Purdue University, Sorin Adam Matei
Contents |
[edit] The Visible Past Vision
A LiveScribe Pencast presentation of the Gwiki environment]. Notes taken with a Pulse Pen.
[edit] The Project Featured in The Chronicle Of Higher Education
[edit] A Showcase of Features:
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A brief system overview |
- contact us at s m a t e i / a t \ p u r d u e / d o t \ e d u
[edit] When information searches for you
Imagine a site where people interested in the same historical events, places, monuments or periods can network.
Imagine a site that can automatically index information and create clusters of events, places or historical personalities based on the users' common interests in them.
Imagine a site that can recommend the best books or articles available for a specific historical topic.
Imagine a room with life-size screens on which virtual models of the ancient Roman Forum, of the Omaha Beach Battle or of the Forbidden City would be projected and interacted with in 3d.
Now imagine people using cell phones, desktop or laptop computers, or full immersion 3d virtual reality models and talking to each other *through* the atlas, allowing them to share impressions, passions and ideas as they contribute, edit, or consume the atlas' contents.
These ideas do not belong to the realm of science fiction. They are the product of the Visible Past project, initiated by a group of faculty at Purdue University. Visible Past is a seamless system of information storage and retrieval that turns the idea of information searching on its head: spatially aware, read/write, and multi-user, Visible Past makes information search for you.
[edit] Technical details
Visible Past is a cross platform, scalable research and learning environment. Its primary aim is to help students and scholars to experience and communicate with fully immersive, historically accurate models of past geographic realities or to relate information to specific real geographic locations. It also includes a social networking utility and content rating/review facilities. If fully immersive models are used, these can be visualized and interacted with in a number of settings: virtual reality theaters, webpages or geographic exploration interfaces such as Google Earth or NASA Worldwind. (Our vision as described in FIRST MONDAY).
The Visible Past environment, which is a collection of tools and content, relies on two main technologies. First, there is the Georeferenced Wiki (gWiki) in which the information is stored. This very site is an example of a gWiki. Although this example is built on top of MediaWiki, a gWiki can be built on top of any other wiki platform. The main characterstic of a gWiki is that it allows storing and indexing information spatially and temporally at the granularity of a single character, one sentence, one image, or an entire article. We currently use the popular kml format to georefence information, which allows quick data connectedness with a number of geographic environments.
The gWiki includes a navigable map that displays information about locations visible in the main textual entry area (see upper left corner of this page). Markers on the map indicate that spatially-referenced information about that area is available for browsing. Click on one of the stars on the map and see what happens. (To come back to this page, use the sidebar menu entry for "Main Page").
The spatial component of the gWiki facilitates information delivery about a specific location based on a user's real (in the field) or virtual (map, virtual reality model, etc.) proximity to that location. In the Visible Past gWiki the information is presented both textually and spatially, which makes it a location-aware technology.
The combination of a wiki with location aware technologies make the Visible Past gWiki a very powerful tool for retrieving, editing and enhancing spatially aware information. However, the policies and technologies of editorial control in the gWiki are much more expert friendly than typical wiki environments, such as Wikipedia.
In its current iteration the Visible Past gWiki is designed to interact with a number of models. One is of Ancient Rome as it appeared in Antiquity (cca 400 AD). The VR model was created by Diane Favro (UCLA), Bernard Frischer (UVA), Cairoli Giuliani (University of Rome), Russell Scott (Bryn Mawr College) & Modelers Dean Abernathy, Philip Stinson, Carmen Valenciano, Alessio Mauri. A set of Quicktime VR movies are archived and are publicly viewable from UCLA's ETC lab. Another, is a model of the Omaha Beach June 6, 1944 debarkation point, created by Purdue University.
The Visible Past gWiki can facilitate real life visits to these or other ancient or past geographic environments. Our team works on enhancing these environments with game-like scenarios and location aware applications supported by the gWiki.
The goal of the Visible Past gWiki is to enhance research, classroom and museum learning via interaction with the life-size or scaled down, desktop based, virtual reality models of the ancient environments. Information is delivered in a narrative format via interaction with information repositories, located locally or on the Internet. The project is designed to extend and to validate a theoretical framework for humanities research and learning. It also aims to establish a set of methodological tools for virtual reality research and learning that can be extended to other environments and locations.
The Visible Past gWiki will be available to the user as a life-size, 3D environment and as smaller scale models that can be used via single or multiple screen 2D projections and web-based applications. Each type of delivery represents a new research or teaching environment and is empowered by or connected to mobile location-aware communication technologies and platforms.
The principal investigators, Sorin A. Matei, Chris Miller, Nick Rauh, Laura Arns, have developed several tools for learning in virtual environments by taking advantage of the FLEXTM (Fakespace) system available at Purdue University’s Envision Center, which will constitute the main Visible Past development location. They have successfully used this environment to teach undergraduate courses and to complete a pilot study of situational research and learning of geographic and institutional information. The results of these teaching and research activities suggest that the system has the capacity to enhance learning outcomes and to serve as a prototype for testing user reactions to various learning experiences and methods of information delivery.
[edit] What does Visible Past do:
Fosters learning by creating a digital environment geared toward the delivery, discovery, and storage of information, by using the spatial and temporal characteristics of that information as the organizing structure of the knowledge it creates.
[edit] Who developed it?
It is being developed at Purdue University by a multidisciplinary team of faculty and students led by Dr. Sorin A. Matei, Associate Professor of Communication.
[edit] The Purpose:
The goal is to enhance research, classroom, and museum learning by harnessing the implicit space and time attributes of iinformation while at the same time fully embracing the read/write ethic. We also intend to validate and extend a theoretical framework for humanities research and learning. We aim to establish a set of methodological tools for virtual reality, location-sensitive reearch and learning that can be extended to other environments and, indeed, other disciplines.
[edit] What it Is:
The heart of the environment is the data store behind its georeferenced wiki (gWiki). Our idea explodes the common model of wikis by opening read/write capabilities to any/all clients capable of reading and rendering georeferenced data, including Google's Maps and Earth, NASA's WorldWind, location-sensitive mobile devices, and immersive VR environments such as Purdue's Envision Center CAVE, and of course the more traditional, web-based wiki interface common to users of WikiPedia, Wiktionary, WikiMedia Commons (see the Clients page for a complete list of clients we are actively testing).
[edit] How it Will Work:
Clients to the information will all very generally work in the same way: as a user moves through space (virtual, real, mapped), information tied to llocations on the earth will be revealed to them as they approach those llocations. Once revealed, the information can be edited and resubmitted (to greater or lesser richness depending on the client), consumed, or ignored. The Clients page has more to say about which client can do how much. Want to know more? Watch this videoclip.
