 So, good afternoon everybody. My name is Rita Lucarari. I'm professor of Egyptology in research studies. And this lecture is not about Egyptology, but I also am interested in digital humanities. I'm a digital journalist myself by now. I do a lot of photography and work for applying digital humanities to Egyptology. And it's been really nice for me to meet Ajati, a true for colleagues in digital humanities, from Stanford. We introduced us, and I was happy to organize this lecture for Ajati, because the topic is also relevant for my own work. As you know in Egypt we have a lot of evidence to save and visualize with those immersive experiences. So, I read just a short bio of Ajati. Dr. Ajati is Bernadu, a senior research associate at the Digital Curation University at FIDA, and research associate in information studies at the University of Presto. She has talked digital curation and the department of communication, media and culture at university, and is currently teaching digital methods in humanities at the department of informatics. At the University of Economics and Business. And she is here only for this week, unfortunately. She already gave a really engaging class for my course of Digital Humanities and Egyptology. So, I'm really looking forward now to hear this new lecture entitled Immersive Experiences and Difficult Admitage. But lessons, challenges ahead. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, thank you, Rita, and thanks, everybody, for being here. I've come here all the way from Athens, Greece. Just a few words about myself so that you can sort of have an idea of where I'm coming from. My training has been on ancient history and archeology. And I have been working in the field of the digital humanities for quite a few years now, over a decade. But, just to make sure I've said it, I'm not an IT specialist myself in any way. And this is going to be my approach. So, as Rita said, my affiliation is dual right now. So, I'm attached to a scenery center in Athens, Greece, and also the University of Glasgow. And what I'm going to be talking to you about this afternoon is going to be a three-part, so to say, three-part research. A three-part paper and research I've been carrying out with the teams of Glasgow and Athens. And hopefully I'll have lots of reactions from you. Now, as Rita said, this is a very kind of a compost, tightly immersive technologies and difficult heritage. What have we learned so far from our work and what are the challenges that are lying ahead? Just for the background. So, what do we mean when we talk about immersive technologies? What are these things, what are these digital experiences that we are describing? So, immersive technologies can be perceptual and or interactive. I'll come back to that in a while. But sort of distort the boundaries between the physical world and the digital, the simulated, so to say, world. So, these are the experiences in which the user or the visitor, if we're discussing, you know, a museum setting, feels part of the experience as a whole. So, all spheres of the attention get immersed. So, we can get sensory immersion, audiovisual, I'm sure you understand that, all factories smelling, does the smell have any role in these sorts of experiences? Haptic, when we touch things? And so on. And also, challenged based immersion, like interaction, when the visitor or the user does something and expects the system to respond. And of course, imaginative immersion, when we have a narrative that allows reinterpretation of any sort of element that we are concentrating on. So, the perceptual types that I discussed just before are basically 3D, 4D, which is a combination of 3D as well as non-analog experiences. Basically, you are within a 3D environment and you touch something. This is considered to be 4D, or also when you smell things, when you get water sprayed at you. These are things that theme parks, like Universal Studios, of course, have engaged with for a long while now. Of course, the full dome in which video projection is around the dome and we get immersed into a very particular kind of a visualization. Holograms, you see them, you come to see them in airports lately, but you can get them in museums, you can interact with holograms, you can let them narrate a story for you. And of course, VR. We all know what VR is. I'm not going to give you a class here on VR. Augmented reality, which basically blends virtual reality with the physical world, so it's a form of enhancing our perception of the physical world through the digital medium. 3D audio and surround systems as well as haptic technologies in which we use our hands or body to perceive through the digital medium different aspects of a digital object. So these were the perceptual types. These are the things that the techies, so to say, or our friends, the engineers designed and implement for us as parts of immersive experiences. So just to make it clear, immersive experiences can be any one of those types or any combination of those types. So you can have 3D and AAR, you can have haptics in a dome, you can have any sort of combinations around them. So what we experienced this morning at the SEDIS lab was a immersive experience, of course. It was a VR, it was pretty straightforward to measure. Interactive types. So the types in which the user or the visitor get some input of some kind and then the technologies read the input and react to the reaction of the user. So Siri here in San Francisco I noticed everybody uses Siri. Siri is a means of an interactive experience. So you say something to a machine effectively and the machine responds. Alexa, Google Home and, of course, all these gaming platforms in environments such as PlayStation, Xbox and so on, so forth. Brain computer interface technologies which provide direct pathways of communication between a wired brain and external devices, these are all interactive types. So these are the types in which something is expected from you and the system responds. In 2019 or 2020 where we nearing 2020 immersion is part of our everyday life effectively, not just in our interaction with cultural heritage, as well as any sort of interaction with culture but in our everyday sort of life series and all those things I described. But what happens when it comes to user experience in heritage sites that employ immersive experience to enhance visitor satisfaction. So as part of our work in the University of Glasgow we carried out the large scale quantitative and qualitative analysis of user experience and visitor experience in sites across Scotland that have been working with the digital quite extensively and at this point I'd like to show you video that tells everything much better than I do. National Library of Scotland and Glasgow museums it's goals were to explore the audience data of immersive experiences of all kinds in Scotland to provide evidence for design and procurement values in immersives for the heritage industry. It's core questions were how successful are the current approaches to immersive technologies at major heritage sites in Scotland? What kinds of future development in procurement and design are supported by this evidence? Tourism is a six billion pound business in Scotland and there are some 17 million visits annually to heritage and culture sites in Edinburgh and Glasgow alone. Immersive experiences are on their eyes and audiences are changing fast. The Scottish Heritage Partnership collected new data for government cultural and creative industry use. We asked visitors how they responded to the immersive experiences at a number of sites at any issues they experienced. We surveyed sites with mixed immersive experiences including VR, video games, surround video, multimedia rooms, reconstructed interiors and themed outdoor spaces. Kajms of immersive experience are best. Audiences like immersive experiences but prefer mixed virtual and physical experiences with a blended experience and a strong storyline. Content was regarded as important, irrespective of the mode of delivery, less gimmicks and more content. Intangible heritage requires a thickening of the narratives of contemporary museological practice. Under 35s are the most comfortable with entirely VR and digital based experiences. Audiences prefer the option of handling objects alongside the experience. Reaction has been entirely positive. People have really enjoyed being able to see digital versions of the models and then perhaps see some reconstructed objects that we have and then to see the object in the gallery. So that variation of ways of looking at material is proved to be very stimulating I think for people. I think we're always looking for new ways of complementing the collections and our reason to be as a museum is to try and reach the widest possible audience and we see virtuality as a new way of reaching audiences who perhaps previously haven't found a museum as accessible as they might through virtual reality. Physical objects are best, but even virtual object handling is preferred to a purely virtual environment. What is the site demographic and do I want to change it? Can it replace guided tours and audio guides completely? How will it enhance interpretation and content for whom? What is the balance in the visitor experience between a recreated and a virtual environment and why? How will touch complement site in the VR elements of the experience? Will certain demographics experience nausea from 360 immersion? Will audibles be needed? And if so, can they be subtitled? What other accessibility considerations would be needed? How many of the five senses are you reaching? Does smell have a role to play? What kind of exciting and substantial narrative is needed to make up for the lack of a social dimension in VR? Can digital content be available in part to engage more younger adults and children? How can we personalize content? Where will the immersive experience be cited? And how will it be mixed with existing content to maximize audience response? What physical material should the immersive project enhance or work in conjunction with? What is the value added by VR or AR? And does it justify the maintenance and development costs of all-going technical upgrades? What is VR or AR or haptic delivery? What is the comparative efficacy, objectives and costs? SHP findings using data from six sites strongly suggest the need for next immersive experience additional digital resources for younger demographics? Strong, high content narrative object handling We'll be sharing our detailed findings with Nesta and the Scottish Government. Partnership in which, as you heard, analysis of user experience evidence across six sites in Scotland that make use of immersion. So the key findings that I'd like to pick up at this stage, at this moment is the need for mixed immersion. So basically no VR alone no DOM alone or not just AR will satisfy the visitor as much as a mixed experience. And the second thing is that content is king. So you need to have a very strong narrative around whatever digital methods you decide to employ to enhance and expose virtual heritage in the digital environment. What really struck me personally when looking at the findings in Scotland were findings from two sites. One was Culloden up to the very north near Inverness and the other one was Bamakburn. Now I'm pretty sure that you've all heard of Robert the Bruce. He was the Scott warrior, Scott King that stopped the English from taking over Scotland in the I think 14th century BC. Bear in mind that we're now in Berkeley very far away at the other side of the world but right now Britain is effectively boiling. What with Brexit and the Scottish independence referendum so sites like Bamakburn in which the Scottish independence was sealed for years is a very sensitive site. So what we figured is that the colleagues that put together in measure in Banakburn they played around very strong content and very strong messages during setting up the whole the whole immersive experience. I'll tell you what they did but before I do I would like to tell you that Banakburn as well as other sites is one of those sites that we described that have been described as difficult heritage. So difficult heritage is any sort of cultural heritage that is so sensitive especially politically that tends to divide people or disrupt our perception of identity. This is a term that was coined by Sharon MacDonald back in 2007 and it does have to do with unsettling often violent histories. Difficult heritage has found its way in popular culture as well. Now this is a screenshot still from I think it's a success and an HBO series in which the character casually says what about terror let's do a VR experience let's have people die or something so difficult heritage has become in a way sexy. A couple of years ago students from a Japanese university I don't believe it was Tokyo with the support of a big mobile of a company that put together a VR experience called the day the world changed which focused on the Hiroshima event. So basically you were one of the inhabitants of Hiroshima in the morning the bomb dropped and in your coverage you could see what was happening around you so you were actually standing and looking at people dying looking at the babies falling apart getting the whole terror in front of your eyes. Now this was never commercialized you can find a video on YouTube but this was never taken forward and adopted by museums to say so immersion in difficult heritage is a kind of a touchy thing for the Egyptologists here the Gabelay man currently in the British Museum. Now this is an actual mummy that has been preserved in an excellent way dates back Rita correct me from Rome to 3 3500 before Christ so it's a pretty old thing but the ginger hair on his head are still visible and he's a young adult he's crouching, he's very crouching he's naked and for years people could only see this thing in the British Museum and it was actually in a glass frame down on the floor people almost tripped on him right difficult heritage is not just buildings and it's not just notions difficult heritage is not just the holocaust and it's not just Hiroshima or not just the actual site of Auschwitz this is also difficult heritage I'm sure you agree and it's because it's a human body and despite the fact that it's so old that has no chronology as you know it's very well preserved so it can be a bit unsettling so what did the British Museum do? they just came up with a very simple idea they used a screen, a touch screen an interactive screen with which the visitor could basically interact with the actual mummy touching it and exploring the way and the the context of the person's death so he was stabbed in the back and depending on where you zoomed in you zoomed out you could basically find out more about this dead body in the technology now this was a way to mediate to attract attention to the actual exhibit the British Museum found that the percentage of people visiting the museum just to make use of that screen and then obviously look at the body that was right there increased proportionately and also they figured that spending time to actually look at the mummy was much higher when the screen was set up than beforehand so you felt so people felt that they had some sort of an interaction with the actual object an interaction that was in fact mediated by the digital so sure yes it was right behind the screen so you could see the body and you just the digital was a way not touching the body but actually interacting with it there have been lots of publications about the Galilei man and this sort of system that they did and this has been years now I think it's five years ago that they actually did a pretty simple thing it's not VR, it's not augmented it's nothing like all those fancy things I was describing beforehand but what we can see here is that we have what the Scottish Heritage Partnership identified as a key as a key as a key finding in the during the research but it's a mixed measure basically you have the actual object and then you have the digital and you interact with both you can see the one and you can touch the other kind of banok point that I was telling you about picture work here's what they did we're not going to see that of course we'll keep the scots dated to Mark Lee 700th anniversary of the battle it's being described as one of the most important events on British soil and defines the relationship between scots and the English one of the challenges in banok burn is that no objects have actually survived the 700 years since the battle so unlike a traditional museum obviously the centre where you're studying objects and maybe reading graphic panels or maybe even potentially watching film about something that just wasn't possible in there so we had to take a completely new approach to interpretation so how do you achieve mixed immersion in order to get the audience to sort of divide into two armies and actually simulate a battle them fighting each other so that they go through so that you divide the audience into two teams and you have them re-fight the battle and you randomly yes, just in a minute and you randomly allocate each member of the audience to the English or the Scots so you may be a Scottish nationalist and you may end up playing for the English army and actually while you play you may end up reversing the history that was my question basically you'll have the English on this side and the Scots on this side at the moment the army of the Scots is actually training and then suddenly you may be immersed in the middle of a battle or the actual battle on the second day what you're seeing on screen has been reproduced in terms of the weaponry here so you've got things like a war knife axes, crossbow even right down the road and they would wear themselves and that gives you an idea not only you're immersed in the period through the interactive technology but you can get an idea physically what it must have been like but most of it is motion capture and then it's basically then computer generated based on the research of the academic panel the faces on the individuals have been scanned on by real human beings real humans as well as interactive high definition technology which screens here as well so what these do is these will give you further information in how you actually play the game so for example before you take part in the game you're learning all about the medieval life and then you would go through here and this will break the game down for example when you see the symbol this means spearman you see this other symbol it means cavalry and again all this touchscreen is a part of the learning curve so hopefully you'll win the battle be you in English or something the fight choreography and the immersive 3D space within which that takes place helps to tell the battle because it's the step before people actually fight so in that space visitors are walking in practically fresh off the street and we're trying to get them up to speed on medieval battle weapons tactics just general warfare and we need to do that in a really snappy quick way which doesn't rely on text which doesn't rely on narrative voice overs so we designed a space that is a virtual space that when you sat inside that sort of immersive room although the room is got the bigger than the average badminton court it actually feels like you're in the middle of a huge field electrisonic were involved in the design of the the scheme they were involved with the design in terms of risk and throughout that whole process I found we always got the answers we were looking for from a design point of view and then throughout the procurement and installation period exceeded the expectations the big expectations that we had so basically this has been considered to be the most successful immersive experience in Scotland right now and the reason behind it of course is not just the state of the art of the technology is the disruption of the collective narrative behind the battle it was pretty straightforward that especially smaller children not kids but like 9 or 10 or 15 year olds they got really immersed they really wanted to win regardless of their own machinality so you got Scottish kids really wanted to win for the English army and vice versa I was there to see you can see families being randomly divided so the dad and the daughter are Scots and the warriors and the mother and the brother and the little boy are English and so on so forth so taking this these lessons learned and all these experience from Glasgow to Athens we have designed an even more difficult proposal but still awaiting final approval in which we would like to reconstruct virtually reconstruct a building of a concentration camp that lies in the western outskate of Athens in Higari that's how it's called it's a suburb the virtual experience will be centered around the first version experience of events and sites as observed and endured by the user character which will be a prisoner so we will watch his interplay with and incarceration amongst the other people health captain and learn about the place the actual building through a story which unfolds through his interactions with officers but should be Germans cellmates rumor spreading within the block through the walls as well as weighted reasonable glimpses of torture suffering so this is what we will try to do in Athens hopefully under the auspices of the German Embassy so this production this is not part of the production these are states from similar games that we will be looking at to look at the aesthetics of the actual experience so this production will be mixed in that it will combine story driven exploration of the camp and its important landmarks interactive discovery of the facts through point trigger actions of course this whole and deeper will entail a lot of archival research and historical research so we have onboard our team some of the best historians of the period that we work on that and of course we will employ commercial and free to use policy now we are looking into ways in which we can personalize the experience so I guess that the 40 year old may not need to have the same experience of torture and pain as a 10 year old so we will see about that but this will be the first time that such a thing will ever be undertaken in Europe so this is what I was telling in class what happens when we move near the time towards the 1945 events in Greece and in Europe how do you mediate that through the digital in such a way that's informative as well as education because of course it cannot be entertaining in any way so we hope that this will be a pretty impactful project it will be the first one on a contested site the difficult heritage I guess I don't need to go into any more reasons but this will be a very difficult heritage project we want to enhance the understanding of the building bear in mind that despite the fact that this is a building effectively within the wider region of Greece very few Athenians or Greeks know about it it lies within a current army camp so licensing and all those things will have to be resolved but also it's not open so the only way and also it's a very old building and only if tree has grown a lot in front of it so the roots are sort of destabilizing the whole structure so they are reconstruction of it will be sort of maintaining it for the years to come we hope to renew the cultural identity of the region of Athens by letting people know that we did the region of Athens and also as you know Europe is a boiling pot right now, but with the right wing left wing and all those discussions so different socio-cultural groups from different perspectives we have to participate in this interactive experience and we are really looking forward to the user experience evaluation when this project comes to the end and of course and this poses questions to you because this is just a very I mean it is a sort of innovative proposal how objective can we be should we be and why how we are into reinterpretation of the actual side can we try and go into educational purposes in this experience we actually entertaining educational or not entertaining it will not be evaluation of visitor experience is part of our proposal and we need to see where this will take us and of course matters of preservation of the actual site will it work like the Gabelene man where the digital actually increased the interest towards the actual exhibit the actual physical object or not so this is all for me thank you