Posts Tagged ‘ heritage jam ’

The ARtefactKit – Heritage Jam 2017 Winner

Somehow the Heritage Jam run by the University of York has come round around again and gone. As I outlined in this post the Heritage Jam is an opportunity for people to get together and create new heritage visualisations relating to a specific theme. The theme this year was ‘Bones of Our Past’ – as I couldn’t be there in person, I decided to go ahead and put something together for the online competition.

It turns out my entry won first place! I built something that I have wanted to experiment with for a quite a while – an Augmented Reality application that allows you to take a real artefact (in this case a bone) and compare it to a virtual reference collection. By using your phone you can augment a ‘virtual lab’ onto your kitchen table and then use the app to call up a number of different bones from different animals until you can find one that matches.

The AR aspect of it adds something more to the ‘normal’ online virtual reference collections – by allowing you to augment the models in the correct scale in front of you and then twist and turn each one side by side.

In addition, as I am interested in multi-sensory things, I also added in the sounds and smells of the animals – as well as a virtual portal into a 360 degree video of a deer herd in action.

Finally, it has a link through to a set of Open Data from Open Context showing where else in the world similar types of bones have been found.

You can watch the visualisation here:

Please check out the full visualisation and explanation here: http://www.heritagejam.org/new-blog/2017/10/27/the-artefactkit-stu-eve

As with all of these ‘jam’ projects, the app is just a prototype and is quite messy in terms of overall look and feel – but I think it has potential to be quite useful. Now I just need some funding!

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Heritage Jamming

As an archaeologist, I’m used to reporting old news, and this is pretty old – however, might be of interest.

In 2014 and 2015 I participated in the University of York’s Heritage Jam. The Heritage Jam is a really excellent initiative, bringing together an eclectic group of archaeologists, gamers, makers and heritage specialists to hack together a project within two days of intense work, locked in a small room. For those not able to travel, there is also the option to participate online.

Heritage Jam Logo

As well as the final prototype each team is expected to produce a paradata document, that outlines the motivations behind the project and also expands a little on the method and technologies used. The intense session really pays dividends and being locked in a room focuses the mind to get a lot of things done – without the constant distractions of the real world.

In 2014, my team won first prize with our ‘Voices Recognition’ project which explored the auralisation of a cemetery in York, and in 2015 I was awarded Highly Commended for my individual entry, the Dead Man’s Nose, a device which I developed, built and use to deliver smells in-situ while investigating archaeological sites. I used it to explore the olfactory landscape of the Moesgaard Museum Archaeological Trail (Denmark) – a link to the video and paradata is here.

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