 My work focuses on designing a series of experimental interfaces for museums that transforms cultural heritage data into narratives of engagement. This allows audiences to rediscover and reinvent ancient cities, cultural objects and practices. This embodied museography, as I call it, is defined by the attributes of immersion, and participation, and necessarily asks us to re-examine our notions of aura, authenticity and authorship. We're currently witnessing extreme forms of cultural cleansing that are focused on destroying the very fabric of our society. And while politically motivated destruction has been with us for thousands of years, it remains one of the most powerful socio-cultural weapons of our times. That change catastrophes are increasing at alarming rates, and natural disasters are wreaking havoc. Mass tourism is threatening to engulf those places that we hold most dear. And digital imaging technologies have the potential for us to be able to create futures for a past under threat. 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 capture art in a way that lets us zoom into the tiniest brushstroke and see more than the naked eye can see. But these new imaging technologies alone are not enough to bring objects and places to life in ways that are profound and unforgettable. My research brings together hardware and software engineering, art and science to expand upon the perennial visualization paradigms of the panoramic, the panoptic and the hemispheric. These systems 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. The CEO of Intel, Brian Kresnick, said in late 214, we are in the midst of a transformation from a world of screens and devices to a world of immersive experiences. And we'll begin our immersive experience today at the Dongwang Caves in the Gobi Desert, the nexus of the Silk Road. This World Heritage Site contains 492 caves with 45,000 square meters of mural paintings and over 2,500 stucco statues. They are in size and breadth like nothing else in the Chinese Buddhist world, crafted by Buddhist monks over a period of a thousand years. To give you an insight into the significance of these caves, the Library Cave, Cave 17, contained 15 cubic meters of manuscripts, including the oldest book in the world, the Diamond Sutra, the earliest known depiction of the Chinese constellations. These were all stolen from the site by explorer archaeologists and are now distributed across 18 countries. They're being digitized and digitally repatriated in a project run by the British Library called the International Dongwang Project. The caves are also under serious threat from what you could call as micro-climate change. Rising humidity inside the caves due to human traffic means that the paint is flaking off the walls. The Dongwang Academy has 60 full-time photographers working there and they laser scan and camera array photograph. It takes three full months to digitize a single cave. We took the dataset from cave 220 to create pure land inside the Magal Grottoes at Dongwang. It's staged in a 360 degree enclosure which is 10 meters across and 4.5 meters high and it gives over 30 people a one-to-one scale experience of being inside these caves. It starts with a modest cave browser of significant caves at Dongwang on a laser scan of the escarpment. We then enter inside and simulate what it's like to be there now if you have visited Dongwang. You will know that you're on a tour with up to 60 people and several LED torches revealing fragments of the murals. But a digital cave is all powerful. We created a magnifying glass to be able to examine the 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 Dongwang Academy, this is the most accurate scientific representation of what the caves would have originally looked like. We modeled many of the instruments in 3D. There are 32 musicians in this particular mural painting. There are over 4,000 unique instruments found throughout the Dongwang murals. We also filmed Beijing Academy dancers in a blue screen studio and inserted their video into the scene to represent the four dancers in the painting. It was a study, a prototype if you like, for what you could do if you had 492 digital caves. But so far this digital representation of a cave that is permanently close to the public has been seen by over a million people. We took the wireframe from the laser scan and we printed on the walls of this exhibition booth at one-to-one scale. You're able to walk inside the cave. It's like a window on the world to reveal these very high-resolution mural paintings. This interface is noteworthy for three qualities. The first is the way it harnesses socialization around a single screen. Socialization is at the core of the museum experience. It's not about giving everybody their own device. It's about bringing people together for collective engagement. It's a multi-generational interface, young children, middle-aged ladies, grandmother, grandchild. The third most noteworthy quality is the virtual, virtual tourism. So this is the wife. She's taken her iPad from her handbag and she's filming her husband's experience of a virtual cave. When this work was installed at the Frias Ackles Smithsonian, the Washington Post critic Philip Kennecott said, at last we have a virtual reality system worthy of inclusion in a museum devoted to the real stuff of art. This really goes to the heart of the provocation of digital materiality and digital aura. With increasingly high-quality facsimiles, museums are confronted with this problem and this innovation. The French philosopher Bruno Le Tour likes to talk about the migration of aura, leaving the original object and going to the high-quality digital facsimile. I like to talk about a proliferation of aura, but however you choose to define it with ultra-high-quality facsimiles and immersive experiences, you have profound, erratic experiences. Moving from ancient China to historic India, place Humpe is an artwork which was commissioned for France, India year in 2006 and subsequently toured the world. Humpe is a monumental world heritage precinct and a vibrant centre for contemporary pilgrimage. The artwork recombines 25 square kilometres of this extraordinary terrain in a 3D panoramic imaginary. It uses a rare stereoscopic film camera to create left and right eye images, ambisonic sound recording for a 3D architecture of sound, motion capture for animation. It's staged in a 360-degree screen again, but this time there's a motorised platform at the centre that allows visitors to rotate their field of view in that full 360-degrees. About 25 to 30 people in the room at any one time and any member of the public will take the audience on a serendipitous journey of discovery through the many wonderful locations at Humpe. There's a microphone mounted on the platform which when you speak into it will release a Sanskrit text into the world that comes from chapter 13 and 37 of the Ramayana to do with the gathering of the monkeys at Kishkinda because Humpe is said to be Kishkinda from the Ramayana. And you enter inside any one of these panoramas and some of them are augmented with computer graphics. These are of Hindu gods, it was the first stereoscopic animation done in India by Indian artists and animators. The music by Dr. L. Subramaniam, who's a karnatic violin superstar. This work is now the central feature of a new museum located just 20 kilometres from the site itself. It's an initiative of the JSW Foundation, the museum is embedded in a thriving cultural initiative called Kaladham and celebrates the cultural imaginary of that site. And it's a wonderful thing for this work to travel back to its point of origin. At Most Major Museum, there's only a fraction of a collection on display. At the British Museum, it's only 0.4%. At the Smithsonian, it's 2%. At Museum Victoria and Melbourne, it's 0.8% of the collection on display. So we need new strategies for accessing these reservoirs of cultural memory. So we built for Museum Victoria a data browser, it's 100,000 objects, it's an export from the content management system and we use the metadata to create semantic relationships between all of these objects. They're distributed by time, so by increasing and decreasing the temporal components, you're increasing and decreasing the density of the material. There are 18 themes bringing together social history, indigenous material and natural sciences. You can zoom into the objects, it creates a wordle from the description of that object, you can access the original record and then you can traverse the overall dataset using its metadata relationships. This is a new form of real time curating, a new access point to the storehouse of the museum collection and a serendipitous browsing paradigm where you'll always encounter the unexpected. The Prince of Wales Museum has been adopted as the epicentre for an artistic exploration that focuses on the amazing ceiling architectures found throughout Mumbai and transforms them into an urban celestial imaginary. Mumbai is unrivaled in India for its architectural heritage, it has the highest concentration of art deco buildings of any city in the world, neo-gothic buildings and also Indo-Sarasantic buildings. We shot 180 gigapixel images across the city and the work is installed in Dome Lab which is the highest resolution touring full dome system in the world and over 2,000 people a day came for over a month to rediscover their city with fresh eyes. It uses a computer algorithm to transition from one image to the next to ensure that you are on a never ending journey. And I'll illustrate that through this work, it's a collaborative artwork with 47 indigenous artists from the central deserts of Australia. With painted one and a half meter wide perfect fisheye projection circular images for the dome we scanned them at 1,200 dpi and this is the algorithm running across these images ensuring this never ending journey of discovery. It's a new form of collaborative art making and it transforms a 2D canvas into an architectonic space that has an infinite horizon. The Hong Kong Kung Fu Living Archive is a documentation and analytics project based on an embodied knowledge system. Hong Kong is a reservoir of the most dense intangible heritage but many of these Kung Fu masters are in their 80s and these lineages and these forms are dying out. So we've taken a 4D typology approach which involves extensive motion capture as the only tool available really to describe both the speed and precision of these forms. This is Oscar, both his father and his grandfather were Kung Fu masters and here we see a wire frame model and an automated motion over time analysis which is the left hand, the right hand, the left foot, the right foot and the dantian point in the center of the body. This is Oscar's signature if you like. And then extrapolating from this work and studies in labu notation we've created an automated analysis of human movement and for the Hong Kong Heritage Museum coming up in September we'll install many of this documentation at life-size scale and also in 3D. Remaking the Confucian rights builds upon extensive work at Tsinghua University that is looking at the reenactment of rituals which haven't been performed for hundreds of years. Confucian Li is a philosophy and is really framed by aesthetics, ideology and ethics. It's also a system of the body and it's inscribed and learnt by the body and we again are taking a very scientific approach to the documentation of costumes, movements, utensils and ritual objects and this will allow students and scholars to interactively study the full articulation and meaning of gestures of these forms. And by way of conclusion this is a exhibition concept which brings together 10 of our large scale systems with 20 pieces of content illuminating Asia we hope will change the nature of museum going experience forever. In the words of UNESCO the awareness of cultural heritage is a cultural emergency for our times a political and security imperative. Thank you very much.