We All Live in a Virtual Submarine
Our seas and oceans hide a plethora of archaeological sites such as ancient shipwrecks that, overtime, are being destroyed through activities such as deepwater trawling and treasure hunting. In 2006, a multidisciplinary team of 11 European institutions established the Venus (Virtual Exploration of Underwater Sites) consortium to make underwater sites more accessible by generating thorough, exhaustive 3D records for virtual exploration. Over the past three years, we surveyed several shipwrecks around Europe and investigated advanced techniques for data acquisition using both autonomous and remotely operated vehicles coupled with innovative sonar and photogrammetric equipment. Access to most underwater sites can be difficult and hazardous owing to deep waters. However, this same inhospitable environment offers extraordinary opportunities to archaeologists because darkness, low temperatures, and low oxygen rates are all favorable to preservation. From a visualization pipeline perspective, this project had two main challenges. First, we had to gather large amounts of raw data from various sources. Then, we had to develop techniques to filter, calibrate, and map the data and then bring it all together into a single accurate visual representation.
Discovering Petra: Archaeological Analysis in VR
New tools give archaeologists access to formerly inaccessible parts of the archaeological record. The result is a demonstrably improved model for inquiry to pose, and answer, important research questions. We chronicle a collaborative effort (from 1997 to the present) with Petra Great Temple archaeologists to augment traditional analysis approaches. We introduce new archaeological analysis tools that combine novel visualization and interaction techniques within a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE).
Time and Heritage
As a historian studying what can be considered a form of intellectual history, I have slowly come to adopt Michel de Certeau’s observation made at the end of the 1980s that ‘objectifying the past, for the last three centuries, has undoubtedly left unconsidered time within a discipline that has continued to use it as a taxonomic instrument’. To a certain degree, time has become commonplace for the historian who has preserved or instrumentalized it. It is not considered because it is inconceivable, but because we do not think of it or, more simply, we do not think about it. As a historian attempting to pay attention to the time I’m living in, I have thus, like many others, noticed the swift development of the category of the present until it has become obvious that the present is omnipresent. This is what I refer to here as ‘presentism’.