 I like the fact that even though the technology is bilingual when you read it. It's the same underpinnings, you know So it's like well, it should be in this menu. It's like, okay fine. Here you go I'm Andrew Reinhardt from the University of York. Thank you again for coming and thanks for Megan for listening in and for providing the discussion in a little bit One of my case studies from my PhD thesis at York was studying Skyrim VR if you haven't played Skyrim This is an open-world game that was released in 2011 and then they repackaged it as a VR gaming experience in 2017 and oh my god, it was fun. I played it for yes, it's really fun. You know, it's okay to have fun when you do your work, right? Yes And so thanks for the dance. That's awesome So basically, you know when when playing this you're playing with on the Sony ps4 I was using the ps4 VR headset, which which I got with a microgram from New York. So thanks again and I wanted to see God, I had a lot of questions because as an archaeologist of digital spaces I wanted to see what VR could bring to that experience as an archaeologist and specifically what can VR help me as an archaeologist when I'm working in an open world. I don't care about the real world. Well, I do but I don't I like to work in digital spaces to see What's going on? And VR seemed to provide this really great opportunity to do so and using Skyrim VR Was a good sandbox because it's a controlled environment I played several hundred hours in the original game and I wanted to go and see what I could do now as far as the tools are Concerned, you know for those of you who do dirt archaeology and I used to in Italy and Greece and You know when you were using tools like you see on the slide here And so with with VR you're limited. You have a headset You've got you know in this example with ps4 You've got wands and then you have a camera that is looking at you all the time Which is actually pretty creepy when you think about it But at least it allows you to interact with that digital space. So you have this kind of trans mediation going on So you know with those tools though depending on the game that you play these tools different things And so, you know, it's like having a multi-tool in no man's sky Or being able to turn that that hammer into a pick into a shovel, but using the same tool at once It's like your sonic screwdriver So this is a really wordy slide and I'll send I'll put the slide deck up as public open access after this So you can actually read it But I wanted to do a lot of interesting things or at least things that are interesting to me in this I wanted to see You know how the fieldwork goes in doing survey archaeology landscape archaeology and Skyrim VR I wanted to see if I was asking different questions Research-wise between how I would dig in the natural world versus how I do you do some kind of archaeology in the synthetic world I was really interested in the immersive aspects and phenomenology of Working with these pixelated objects and working with understanding materials and how we interpret materials in a game versus materials in the real world And by the way, I hate using real world and virtual world I prefer to use what Ed Castro Nova says is the synthetic world in the natural world because right now We're we're working in a blended environment. Most of you are on your phones on your laptops or whatever That's real the digital is real so we can we can kind of put that discussion to bed I wanted to start off also by talking about what's an artifact and there are a couple of different artifacts You'll find in games specifically in Skyrim, but also more generally in other kinds of digital environments This is the this is the main gameplay the mason mole-eye ball. It's a really OP weapon But you can pick up if it is man Oh power and so you get this and like they'd like sucks the souls out of people when you use it awesome But you know you have this digital thing and this digital thing goes from Game to game you could find in older versions of the game in the Elder Scrolls universe You can find it or Morrowind for example You can find it in Skyrim it doesn't matter when you find it You can find it here and the cool thing about an artifact like this is if you have played the games at different times in Your life you will actually get the same artifact over multiple times And so you have this multiplicity of digital artifacts that you can get which is really weird And so also the phenomenology, you know When I'm when I pick this up in Skyrim VR it doesn't weigh anything You know it should it should be really heavy And so I would like to have some kind of resistance from the controllers to indicate that this is a heavy weapon versus like a dagger Which is really light so you have different kinds of resistance and stuff like that, but you don't get it And with the materiality something like this You know we're always working with pixels the pixels are assembled in a certain way to say this is this kind of Weapon this is this kind of tool with this kind of whatever else and and so You You're using the same kind of material which is electricity basically in order to do all of this other stuff versus material science in the natural world Where you're working with bronze or you have iron steel would have you There's a separate kind of artifact in the game too I watched Interstellar for the 1700s time on the plane coming over and at the end of the movie spoiler alert You know the McConaughey's character goes into a hypercube Just four-dimensional representation of a cube for space time So and VR this happened to me, and I did not expect this Here's called it alone a glow was a four-dimensional sphere the way that the VR universe is created in the headset is You it surrounds you in a 360 view you're like a fishbowl your head stuck in the middle of the fishbowl, right? And so you're looking around and then all of a sudden I got finished and the game stopped working But I just moved my head and I saw infinite Universities of where I was right here. It's like my god, this is for no one was right And so it's like what do what do we do and so you can document I have this on video and and stuff I was unable to reproduce it. However, so but other people when I went on to read it and stuff because I'm a geek I was able to find that other people have had this experience They just know what was going on and so when you're dealing with digital stuff, you have this kind of artifact Which which is this kind of residue of human-agent interaction with hardware interacting with software That creates something that is unexpected. It's kind of as one of the speakers said earlier Lynn. I think Emergent behavior You know because code is complex code mixed with people more complex and mixed with hardware even more so And so weird shit like that happens Other things that I wanted to do was I wanted to you know, we're talking about artifacts We're talking about the digital and virtual and stuff like that I'm like, what would be cool if I could take an artifact from the game and print it You know so that all of a sudden we have this real-world manifestation of something that exists only in the digital And so I did I haven't created it yet. It looks nasty, but but I find a major space. I'm gonna try it out So basically I use I try to use open-source tools wherever I can if I'm using Photoshop It's just because I have it. I'm not gonna tell you how But you can also have you know things like gem for example just open source software for imaging and stuff So you don't have to pay for it. You know, you can always do the things that you need to do for free And so I was able to to go into Skyrim And there's a turntable mechanic when you're looking at artifacts And you can use your tool to rotate this way and rotate this way And then all of a sudden you've got this 3d scan of something that you would normally do on a turntable in a Lightroom doing object photography. And so you're spinning it and then you use software and I've got the software that I use over on the left side of the slide In order to take that film chop it up into thousands of images And then you switch them together to create what's called a point cloud, which looks remarkably like this pickaxe Which is something that I'm familiar with It create it then overlays the point cloud with a texture Which is directly from the game and then you know when I imported it It's a mesh lab. It looked messy But then you're able to clean it up by and just scrubbing and stuff like that At which point you can export to a 3d printable file so that you can get a pickaxe that's this big or you can scale it up Something that's this big or something like that And so I want to see if you can do that in a digital environment Extract something from the synthetic world to the natural world that didn't ordinarily exist and you can What else do we do? Okay, I Wanted to talk about photography too because what you're talking about Digital spaces and digital environments and even if you're talking about just just regular landscapes You know you look out there. It's like I had a parcel one. It's amazing and it is You can you can take this pan around and coat a grass with your phone or whatever and and and that's great You get this strip that looks something like this. So I'm like, how do I get this in a game? How do I get this in a synthetic environment? and so you know I'm wearing this hat and and you know I spend myself around for a 360 you know Film and then basically following kind of similar steps to working with the pickaxe and that I break up the film into Stank images and then I have a computer stitched together. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't And so this is one of the first the states the literally cool because what this is is a Mobius strip It's a one-dimensional creation of a three dimensional space in the game. So it made this Mobius strip of a pan around lot. That's really pretty cool But it's wrong So so it's like But anyway, you start with something like this you turn your hat to do the movie you split it up into Constitutional images And then ultimately you can either have a computer stitched together or you can cheat By basically matching the images decision that they got by hand and in doing the crop In order to I did this and I'll show you something else in a minute Thank you Where I wanted one of the big issues that I have with with archaeo gaming or with with this kind of synthetic world Archaeology is that if I'm playing Skyrim, I don't want to have to have people buy the game. Holy shit I don't have people spend 60 bucks on something in order to see the work that I'm doing So how do I extract that information and share it in a way that is publicly viewable that has a very low barrier of entry? And so something like this I can put up on my WordPress site with a free web VR Plug-in and it will recognize this as a 3d thing And then if you have Google Cardboard if you have one of those cheap $5 or 5 euro plastic headsets that just takes your phone You'll be able to have the same kind of experience and you can go to this world I haven't had game you have that virtual experience without having to buy Bethesda's product I Did the same thing with doing a 3d walkthrough in the fact that you know I recorded the walkthrough through the headset in this 3d immersive environment and it was able to split that video I'm not using a tool Have to use a path to the tool which is switches Sure, it's not sure where it's basically kind of like pay what you like in order to use this In order to get these split-screen stereoscopic 3d walkthrough so that you can put Google Cardboard on your face and you can have that 3d experience of walking through and so if I want to share with you That experience we can go through and and and have a look and you can see what I see or if you want to be ethical about it You can see what means the archaeologist wants you to see is the audience And so there's a there's a fine line here One of the things that I'm trying to do is being able to record that 3d environment in a way You can explore it too without having to buy the game and without having me directly your attention I also wanted to do things with GIS. Can you do GIS of the game? Yes I was able to find a topographic map that was that was produced as a cc0 public domain map and Was able to import that map Into what I use a photoshop I use inkscape and what not what photoshop allowed us to do is to bring in The map in SVG layers as an image so there's a layer for camps and there was a layer for caves a Layer for Geography and stuff like that and then by importing it inkscape it allows you to have that pass through to I use these in QGIS which is an open source would use our GIS That's behind some other software and and you're able to actually export those files into an AutoCAD readable file that you've been import Into QGIS and all of a sudden you've got an interactive map. It's a GIS map That you can start getting information from and so this is what it looks like with all the different layers here You can turn these on and off and you can do all kinds of these statistical analyses about how that synthetic will just put together Great now in Skyrim. It's a built universe. It's a built environment You know the designers know exactly what is where? But this is preparation for things that are coming You know when you're talking about procedurally generated landscapes and procedurally generated spaces that is safe code and algorithm Making things for people to explore that nobody's seen before well in order to do that We need to first start in this kind of sandbox in order to see what works and what doesn't and then we can then take it to The next step in applying it to a place that hasn't existed before even in front of the programmers I also took a quick side trip into Psycho Geography You know It's basically how does the city make you move around in it and so with a map You know something like this is really horrible to look at. I'm sorry But at least you can see like regions that the programmers have set up as far as what guides exploration How to get from town to town and what not so you have you have that going on too And you'll have that with you the maps that you produce as you go to answer other questions about the landscape Talking I know I'm getting short on time but talking on Cultural immersion being in York we have access to the York Viking Center Which is pretty cool and not cool at the same time In fact that you write this little cart and you can smell the smells to see the sights and hear the sounds and all that stuff But you can't get out and do anything and you're like look these are gonna be soon It's a non-player character and I have questions about me It's like I can't do that and so you know in a game like this and especially in Skyrim because it is heritage or theme It's based on the Nord which is kind of this Norwegian Viking kind of people You can have a PC that you can talk to it stuff and as you're designing these user experiences or as an archaeologist If you're using unity Inject with other kinds of things that you can create You know these NPCs and these quest builders and stuff like that so that you can actually as a player or as a visitor Go and interact directly with these things and you can learn the lingo and find out more about stuff Yorgic is doing something interesting here, but I think you can also supplement on the other side of things with something That is purely digital Let's see Yeah, I know the dragon there's always dragons. That's one of the hazards You know you go and you dig in the Mediterranean you might have scorpions You might snakes and bugs and stinging plants and stuff and Skyrim is dragons bandits, you know So has hazards of the tree that you never thought up until you started doing this kinds of stuff And I'm getting pretty close to the end. Yeah, so this is the last slide These tools that we would use in a natural environment at a natural dig so we can apply similar methodologies and similar pieces of software to digital space the more I work on the digital environment the more I realize It's not all that different from the natural world And you know with a few notable exceptions like going into a four-dimensional sphere We're being attacked by dragons, but still you know where I'm asking similar questions I'm getting similar results and the fact that that in playing games like this like Skyrim VR or playing No Man's Sky or other kinds of things people who play this even though it's a role-playing game or a fantasy game We're still kind of playing as ourselves We have the same kind of needs and the same kinds of questions that we would have in a natural environment and that that kind of Struck is weird. I don't know what I was expecting and doing this But I'm like, you know people are people and so they're asking the same kind of questions and having similar kinds of experiences Even though it's a fantasy place so so anyway, I just wanted to at least let you know what I was up to with that and Thank you very much for your time and attention