 The world of museums that I come from, traditional boundaries have been thrown wide open. New media technologies are expanding our collecting policies, renewing our curatorial visions and refreshing our relationship with audiences. And my research is focused on a series of experimental interfaces that transform cultural heritage data into narratives of engagement, allowing audiences to rediscover and reinvent ancient cities, cultural practices, and objects. Cultural heritage is under an increasing threat from destructive forces spanning iconoclasm to climate change. And while the annihilation of heritage and its keepers has been with us for thousands of years, it remains one of the most powerful sociocultural and political weapons of our time. Natural disasters are wreaking havoc, and mass tourism is threatening to engulf those places that we hold most dear. Digital documentation technologies have a role to play in the sustainability of our most precious legacies. Laser scanning, for example, collects billions of points to represent places such as these heads at Mount Rushmore. We can create precious objects in 3D and peer inside to see what we could not see before. And we can scan art in a way that allows us to zoom into the tiniest brushstroke and see more than the naked eye can see. We can also focus our attention on intangible heritage using new panoramic video technologies and the technologies of motion capture and motion over time studies. We've designed and built about 15 large-scale immersive systems, and they are expanding upon the perennial visualization strategies of the panorama, the hemisphere, and the panoptic. They're looking in. Most recent machine is 120 million pixels in 3D, so it's three times higher resolution than anything else that exists at the moment. These machines offer us strategies for multi-sensory engagement and give us powerful ways to reformulate narrative in a digital context. They emphasize human-to-human as well as human-to-machine interaction. And as interfaces to cultural heritage data, they necessarily ask us to examine our notions of aura, authenticity, and authorship. We're going to begin our journey today in the Gobi Desert in northernmost China at the World Heritage Site of the Dong Wang Caves at the nexus of the Silk Road. 492 caves, 45,000 square meters of mural paintings, they are in size and breadth like nothing else in the Chinese-Buddhist world. To give you an insight into how significant these caves are, this is Cave 17, the library cave, 15 cubic meters of manuscripts were found there, and it includes the oldest book in the world, the Diamond Sutra, the earliest known depiction of the Chinese constellations. These caves are under serious threat from a micro-climate change. Large majority of them are closed to public, rising humidity from human traffic is causing the paint to flake off the walls. And the Dong Wang Academy of 600 full-time employees have 90 full-time photographers who are digitizing this entire precinct. It takes three months to image a single cave. We took the laser scan and the texture data from Cave 220 to create pure land inside the Magal Grottoes at Dong Wang. So it's staged in a 360-degree 3D screen, which is 10 meters diameter and 4.5 meters high, and it allows about 30 people a one-to-one scale experience of being inside the cave. It starts with a cave browser of significant caves located above a laser scan of the entire escarpment. We go inside Cave 220 and simulate what it's like to be there now. So if you are to visit Dong Wang, you're usually with about 60 people in a few LED torches. The context of these mural paintings is quite lost. The digital cave is completely navigable. You can fly up to the ceiling. We created high-resolution magnifying glass so you could examine these murals in great detail. This is the sutra of the medicine buddhas on the north wall of the cave. Using the pigment studies from the Dong Wang Academy, layers of paint were reconstructed to give an impression of what it would have originally been like. 32 musicians appear in this painting and all of their instruments were modeled in 3D. And we filmed Beijing Academy dancers to represent the four dancers in the painting in a blue screen studio and inserted their 3D video into this virtual world. It was built as a prototype as a set of strategies for what you might do if you had 492 caves. Already this work has been seen by over a million people and Cave 220 is permanently closed to public. We're connecting two of our 360 systems together over ultra-high speed bandwidth to teach distributed silk road studies. This is part of a larger project, which I'm calling the Internet of Big Machines, which networks large-scale immersive systems worldwide. We took the wireframe from the laser scan and printed on the walls of an exhibition booth again at one-to-one scale and this allows visitors to navigate inside this world, inside the digital model, using this tablet, which is tracked with infrared cameras, uses very high-resolution data and it's a very high-fidelity experience. This interface has three qualities which are quite noteworthy. The first is the way in which it harnesses socialization around a single screen. Socialization is at the core of the museum experience. It's not really about giving everyone their own device. It's actually about harnessing that interaction. It's also a multi-generational interface from young children to middle-aged ladies, grandmother and grandchild. Grandmother abandons the grandchild. And the third phenomena is the one of virtual, virtual tourism. So here we have the wife with the iPad from her handbag filming her husband's experience using the tablet. Philip Kennecott, critic for the Washington Post, said of the 360 system when it was installed at the Smithsonian, at last we have a virtual reality system worthy of inclusion in a museum devoted to the real stuff of art. And this really goes to the heart of the provocation digital masterpiece and that's an issue of aura, among other things. Bruno Latour, philosopher and Alan Lowey, a creator of facsimiles, have argued for a migration of aura from real objects to digital objects. I prefer to talk about it as a proliferation of aura. But whatever your definition, ultra-high fidelity, immersive and virtual experiences have profound and affecting presence of the digital in their own right. Coming from ancient China to historic India, place Hampi is a world heritage site. It is the kingdom of Vijayanara. And this was an artwork which was commissioned for France into a year and subsequently toured the world. Hampi is a vibrant center of contemporary pilgrimage, as well as an extraordinary geological and 60-degree screen, which has at its center a motorized platform. And that rotates a field of view in 360 degrees. The system itself can have about 25 people inside and any member of the public takes the other visitors on a serendipitous journey of discovery through the many wonderful locations at Hampi. On the platform, a microphone is mounted and you can release Sanskrit text into this world which comes from chapter 13 and 37 of the Ramayana to do with the gathering of the monkeys at Kishkinda. Hampi is said to be Kishkinda. It's a very important mythological place. And you enter inside any one of these panoramas. Some of them are augmented with these computer graphic animations of Hindu gods here, Lord Ganesha. These were done by Indian artists and animators. And it was the first stereographic animation ever done in India. The music that you hear is by Dr. L. Subramaniam, who's a kinetic violin superstar. This artwork is now part of a new museum that we built located inside a new cultural precinct, which is only 25 kilometers from the site itself. So next time you find yourself in deep Karnataka, you could go here to visit much more than you'll see when you visit the site. Moving from landscapes and ancient sites to museum collections, we know at most major museums only a fraction of the collection is on display. So Smithsonian is 2%, British Museum is 0.4%, the Museum I work for is 0.8%. So we built a data browser for Museum Victoria, which is 100,000 objects. It's an export from the content management system. And using the metadata, we're able to link all these objects together across 18 different themes. It's a way of networking the narratives of these objects and recombining them in different pathways. Any member of the public can drive this, you can zoom into images, it creates a word or from the description of the object and you can access the original record. The museum owns a 360 system permanently installed in the gallery space. And here you see to the sides this tagging which allows you to traverse amongst these 18 themes. It's got an emergent soundscape based on the collections of the museum. Lidon Lookup is a new artwork done together with 47 indigenous artists from the western desert of Australia. And it algorithmically recombines these circular fisheye paintings, almost perfect fisheye projection. And it's been installed. It's a project for Dome Lab, which is the highest resolution touring full dome in the world. We scanned all of the art at 1,200 dpi and the algorithm uses computer vision to transition between different images in a way that you will never have the same journey twice. It takes 2D canvases and gives them an up tectonic space with an infinite horizon. And it's a highly collaborative work going from very famous artists in the traditions of Namanjira through to emerging and experimental painters. The Living Archive of Hong Kong Kung Fu is a documentation project on an embodied knowledge system. Hong Kong is a reservoir of incredible and tangible heritage, many migrants coming from China in the mid 20th century. The grand masters of these various lineages are dying out, typically the traditions are passed on orally in quite esoteric languages. And this project creates a 4D topology as opposed to the 2D annotations that you see here. We're using extensive motion capture, extensive digital ethnography to capture all of the movements in 3D form. We're also creating importantly a metadata framework that can deal with intangible heritage data documentation and discovery. This is Oscar, his father and his grandfather were famous Kung Fu practitioners and you can see the speed with which he moves. We are using in the tradition of dance annotation or marble notation, creating automatic systems for motion over time, signatures here, the left hand, the right hand, the left foot, the right foot and the dantian points in the center of the body. And the materials are being used for teaching and learning, for serious gaming and also informing robotics. The remaking of the Confucian rights is a project based on extensive academic research undertaken at Qinghua University in China, recreating costumes for rituals that haven't been performed for over 200 years. The actors are well trained and they come down with costumes and utensils to our lab in Hong Kong and we are documenting in a myriad of ways. Here you see object movies of people and it's creating an interactive archive of this material in its finest detail. So it's a highly didactic undertaking which you can then examine everything from ritual movements to costumes to utensils. It's a combination of aesthetics, ideology embodied in the Confucian system. The movements that these people undertake are inscribed in their body. Mechanics is very important. And just by way of conclusion, Illuminating Asia is a world touring show which brings together 10 of our large scale immersive systems with 20 pieces of content. Here you see a digital way finding device and then you pan out through the galleries into the various works. And we hope this will change the nature of the museum going forever. It's combining the aura of the digital with I guess the reemergence of virtual reality. And in the words of UNESCO, awareness of cultural heritage is a cultural emergency. And these kinds of works are really trying to expand people's understanding of places they may never see or that we must protect. So I'll leave it there. Thank you very much.