Informatics colloquium 9. 5. An overview of the H2020 i-MARECULTURE project and some initial results
Informatics colloquium 9. 5. 2017, 14:00 lecture hall D2
doc. Fotios Liarokapis, Ph.D., FI MU
An overview of the H2020 i-MARECULTURE project and some initial results
Abstract: The project iMARECULTURE (Advanced VR, iMmersive Serious Games and
Augmented REality as Tools to Raise Awareness and Access to European Underwater
CULTURal heritage) is focusing in raising European identity awareness using
maritime and underwater cultural interaction and exchange in Mediterranean Sea.
Commercial ship routes joining Europe with other cultures are vivid examples of
cultural interaction, while shipwrecks and submerged sites, unreachable to wide
public are excellent samples that can benefit from immersive technologies,
augmented and virtual reality. The projects aim to bring inherently unreachable
underwater cultural heritage within digital reach of the wide public using
virtual visits and immersive technologies. Apart from reusing existing 3D data
of underwater shipwrecks and sites, with respect to ethics, rights and
licensing, to provide a personalized dry visit to a museum visitor or augmented
reality to the diver, it also emphasizes on developing pre- and after- encounter
of the digital or physical museum visitor.
This presentation will present the architecture and the first results of the
Horizon 2020 i-MARECULTURE project that aims to develop and integrate digital
technologies for supporting the wide public in acquiring knowledge about UCH. A
Virtual Reality (VR) system will be developed to allow users to visit the
underwater sites through the use of Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) or digital
holographic screens. Two serious games will be implemented for supporting the
understanding of the ancient Mediterranean seafaring and the underwater
archaeological excavations. An Augmented Reality (AR) system based on an
underwater tablet will be developed to serve as virtual guide for divers that
visit the underwater archaeological sites.
Short biography: Dr. Fotis Liarokapis is an Associate Professor at the
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Laboratory, Masaryk University. His research
interests include: virtual and augmented reality; procedural modeling,
human-machine interaction and serious games. He has contributed to more than 100
refereed publications and has more than 2000 citations (h-index: 22 and
i10-index: 38). He has been invited more than 80 times to become member of
international conference committees and has chaired 16 sessions in 11
international conferences. Fotis has secured more than €1,000,000 from a number
of national and international research projects. He is a member of IEEE, IET,
ACM and Eurographics. Moreover, he is the co-founder of VS-Games conference and
has organised numerous conferences and journal special issues. For more
information visit: http://www.fi.muni.cz/~liarokap/.