ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage最新文献

Small museums play a pivotal role in Cyprus cultural landscape by carefully safeguarding and curating historical artifacts, thereby showcasing the country's rich heritage. However, in order to enhance accessibility to a wider audience, it is crucial to make these objects available online. This research aims to explore the effectiveness of the CyprusArk solution (a high-fidelity prototype) in enhancing the online presence of digitized artifacts within Cypriot small museums. By collecting and analyzing qualitative data from six out of ten classified as small museums, the study aims to demonstrate the potential of such solutions, specifically designed for small museums in Cyprus. CyprusArk is a Content Management System, serving as a stand-alone platform for each museum. Instances of the solution will be hosted, supported, and maintained at Cyprus national infrastructure in the high-performance computer facility (HPC), at The Cyprus Institute (CyI). The study has broader implications for the global museum sector, as it showcases the potential of new digital tools to enhance online access to cultural heritage resources and contribute to the dissemination of information “knowledge” among the broader population.

This study developed two distinct types of remote heritage virtual tourism programs, namely VR and AR. We utilized the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model to understand how users’ perceptions of vividness and interactivity in VR and AR influence their sense of presence and perceived authenticity. Furthermore, we explored how the sense of presence and perceived authenticity further impact tourists’ responses, including satisfaction and behavioral intention. The findings indicate differences between VR and AR in several aspects. To elaborate, in the context of VR, vividness significantly influences perceived authenticity, an effect not found within the AR setting. Furthermore, interactivity impacts the sense of presence in AR, but this is not the case in VR. Within an AR setting, a user's sense of presence directly influences their level of satisfaction, yet no corresponding impact was found in VR. Even though the results show varying influences of presence on user intention in VR and AR, no significant differences were discovered. By gaining an in-depth understanding of tourists’ actual perceptions of VR and AR applications, this study provides insights for heritage site managers on how to employ VR and AR to enhance the efficiency of virtual heritage experiences for tourists.

In numerous instances of Islamic architecture, the geometric arrangement of muqarnas was established using square-rhombus tessellations in their flat projections. Similarly, in Türkiye, square-rhombus projection schemes have been employed in muqarnas designs since the era of the Anatolian Seljuks. This study introduces a computer-aided design (CAD) tool called "Anatolian Muqarnas," which aims to recreate muqarnas schemes with square-rhombus projections. The tool is built upon a novel geometric analysis approach specifically tailored for Anatolian Seljuks muqarnas, drawing inspiration from Ammann-Beenker tiling and supertiles. Users of Anatolian Muqarnas can easily simulate existing or new designs by following predetermined rules. This contribution is expected to enhance discussions regarding the geometric analysis of muqarnas and the interplay between computing and cultural heritage at large.

Cultural sites such as museums and monuments are popular tourist destinations worldwide. Visitors come to these places to learn about the cultures, histories and arts of a particular region or country. However, for many cultural sites, traditional visiting approaches are limited and may fail to engage visitors. To enhance visitors’ experiences, previous works have explored how wearable devices can be exploited in this context. Among the many functions that these devices can offer, understanding which artwork or detail the user is attending to is fundamental to provide additional information on the observed artworks, understand the visitor’s tastes and provide recommendations. This motivates the development of algorithms for understanding visitor attention from egocentric images. We considered the attended object detection task, which involves detecting and recognizing the object observed by the camera wearer, from an input RGB image and gaze signals. To study the problem, we collect a dataset of egocentric images collected by subjects visiting a museum. Since collecting and labeling data in cultural sites for real applications is a time-consuming problem, we present a study comparing unsupervised, weakly supervised, and fully supervised approaches for attended object detection. We evaluate the considered approaches on the collected dataset, assessing also the impact of training models on external datasets such as COCO and EGO-CH. The experiments show that weakly supervised approaches requiring only a 2D point label related to the gaze can be an effective alternative to fully supervised approaches for attended object detection. To encourage research on the topic, we publicly release the code and the dataset at the following url: https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/EGO-CH-Gaze/.

This study utilised a user-centred design (UCD) approach integrated into the Agile framework to develop Sarawak Cultural Heritage Progressive Web Apps (SCHPWA). The user experience (UX) of SCHPWA was evaluated using a combination of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) and Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) to measure six dimensions of UX. The evaluation involved 239 participants, comprising 184 females and 55 males. The results indicated that the SCHPWA scored above average in attractiveness, perspicuity, efficiency, and stimulation. However, the dimensions of novelty and dependability scored below average. Therefore, the attributes related to attractiveness, efficiency, stimulation, and perspicuity are grouped using IPA under Quadrant 2 (Possible Overkill), while novelty and dependability fall under Quadrant 3 (Low Priority). The study highlights the benefits of using a combination of UEQ and IPA for evaluating Progressive Web Applications (PWA). Furthermore, it suggests the potential to improve the UX of cultural heritage PWAs. These findings offer insights for designers and developers in optimising the UX of cultural heritage PWA.

Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) is a style of narrative-based Virtual Reality (VR) experience built on filmed or computer-generated 360-degree videos. Since CVR is becoming more popular and widely accessible, researchers and practitioners have been trying to address challenges such as the conflict between the viewer’s freedom of choice and the creator’s control over where to look, or the risk of missing key story elements due to such freedom. As part of the solution, CVR creators employ attention-guiding cues, introduce viewer interaction, and combine these two techniques into all-encompassing CVR production frameworks. However, there are very few CVR projects that embrace the various differences in the backgrounds, preferences, and expectations of each individual viewer. Further to this, they do not consider the content creator/owners’ perspective when presenting and digitizing stories from the real world, especially when considering viewer’s connection to the cultural significance contained. In this paper, a case study is presented to explore the use of adaptability to viewer situations and the coherence to Māori (the indigenous people of New Zealand) storytelling contexts in CVR experiences. In the case study, we began with co-design sessions with storytellers from Te Rau Aroha Marae (an active Māori cultural heritage site in the deep south of New Zealand), about appropriate features to collect from visitors to a virtual storytelling event, then co-built personas as representative tools. 360-degree videos of pūrākau (stories) were then captured and presented via an adaptable VR system. Evaluations were conducted with the storytellers to validate the system, and to collect reflections and opinions on both the use of CVR in Māori storytelling and the cultural appropriateness of CVR with adaptability. We conclude this paper with a discussion of possible improvements for future CVR frameworks.

As Extended Reality (XR) continues to grow, new possibilities arise to provide users with novel ways to experience cultural heritage (CH). In particular, applications based on Virtual Reality (VR) like, e.g., virtual museums, have gained increasing popularity, since they can offer new ways for preserving and presenting CH content that are not feasible in physical museums. Despite the numerous benefits, the level of immersion and presence provided by VR experiences still present challenges that could hinder the effectiveness of this technology in the CH context. In this perspective, it is crucial to provide the users with high-fidelity experiences, in which also the interaction with the objects and the characters populating virtual environments are realistic and natural. This paper focuses on this challenge and specifically investigates how the combined use of tangible and speech interfaces can help to improve the overall experience. To this aim, a immersive VR experience is proposed, which allows the users to manipulate virtual objects belonging to a museum collection (in the specific case, Ancient Egypt remains) by physically operating on 3D printed replicas and to talk with a curator’s avatar to get explanations by using their voice. A user study was conducted to evaluate the impact of the considered interfaces on immersion, presence, user experience, usability, and intention to visit, comparing the richest configuration against simpler setups obtained by either removing the tangible interface, the speech interface or both (and using only handheld controllers). The results showed that the combined use of the two interfaces can effectively contribute at making the CH experience in VR more engaging.

Archives Portal Europe (APE, www.archivesportaleurope.net) is the portal of European archives, an aggregator that connects on a single research point the catalogues and digitised archival material of all archives in and about Europe. It currently hosts material from more than 30 countries, and from a variety of archival institutions (such as State archives, city archives, university and parish archives, private institutions, and more). It is maintained by the Archives Portal Europe Foundation, an international consortium of State archives and other archival institutions that aim to connect the archival material of single institutions into one digital repository, in order to allow universal access to the archival heritage of Europe, promoting new forms of archival research beyond national or local boundaries. One of the research tools made available by Archives Portal Europe is by topics; however, these are currently maintained manually by the archivists, and the vast amount of archival material ingested in the portal makes it impossible to have a comprehensive body of topics that describe the whole of the APE repository. Archives are traditionally not organised by their subject content, but around the entity (person, organization, body) that created and/or collected the documents in the course of their activities. While this is an undisputed pillar of archival management, the availability of online digital repositories for archival research requires new tools for digital archival research, particularly when different archival traditions from different countries and different types of institutions are merged into a unique research portal. Topic detection becomes a fundamental tool to guide archival research and to allow archives to be accessible to potentially world-wide users, in a situation where national and linguistics barriers blur, or are re-defined. This paper presents the preliminary results and plan for future iterations of an AI tool for automated topic detection in a multi- lingual environment, where human-created taxonomies act as bases for the algorithms to aggregate relevant material around a specific topic. The development is based on supervised machine learning, with a combination of human inputs in different languages, and of the usage of Wikipedia pages to model the relevant vocabulary and entities.

After an in-depth examination of the communication strategies, digital offerings, and audio guides currently employed by various Spanish cathedrals constructed during the 12th and 15th centuries, it was detected that there was a need to gradually build and improve an integral and unified tool that serves as a reference for the learning of the artistic elements that characterize the mentioned constructions. This will contribute to both the promotion of the cathedral —understood as an ensemble— and its communication with the public.

This article introduces the conceptualization and design of the mobile application "La Catedral Hispana", a high-fidelity prototype that seeks to promote Spanish cathedrals with Gothic elements in their construction. This prototype encompasses two areas of study for its task: the research of Gothic architecture in cathedrals and the principles of user experience (interaction design, information architecture, and interface development), for the correct development of the sample, using the Figma software for its design and implementation.

The objectives lay not only in providing a tool that facilitates access and shares academic information, but also in establishing relationships among the diverse Spanish cathedrals by means of their common features. The Spanish Cathedral is a proposal for promoting the democratization of cultural information, the learning of the value of heritage, and the development of a new solid and accessible communication channel that enables the target audience to both value and recognize one of the most important types of constructions as a part of Spanish identity.

In the context of online text-picture relic exhibitions, two exploratory experiments were conducted to investigate the role of integrate / separate display, background information, and annotation type in learning tangible heritage. Using ceramic as an example, we tracked the eye movement of subjects under different display forms and tested if they obtained the relevant information. Experiment 1 (N = 48) adopted a 2 (integrate / separate display) × 2 (with / without background information) design and Experiment 2 (N = 93) investigated distinct types of annotation (no annotation, indicative / direct / picture / contour shape annotation). We found that: (1) In the segmented relic display, the usage time, fixation count, and total fixation duration of relic names were lower than those in the integrated case. The probability that subjects would learn comparatively was also lower in the separate display. However, the performance on retention or transfer tests did not differ depending on the integrate / separate display. After reading the background information, subjects paid less attention to relic names but had better knowledge transfer performance. (2) The viewers’ attention allocation to the materials was not significantly influenced by the annotations. Mere visual annotations did not provide an advantage for information acquisition. By contrast, indicative verbal annotation required relatively more time for better target information memory, and the direct verbal cue consumed the least time. Based on the results, we discussed the application scenario of multimedia learning principles and potential recommendations for designing online relic displays.