Session Chair:

WHTour
Tito Dupret
Brussels, Belgium
tito@a2L.be

The WHTour is creating a documentary and educational image bank of printable panographies and online virtual tours for all sites registered as World Heritage by the UNESCO. All panographies are shooted, assembled and uploaded by Tito Dupret, a 34 year-old multimedia director from Belgium and Bijuan Chen, his 26 year-old multimedia assistant from China.

So far, they have covered Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Eastern Canada, China, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, The Philippines, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. This represents 15% of all 788 WH Sites : 125 sites with 750+ panographies. Since January 2003, the WHTour's website has received more than eleven million visits.

Virtual Reality and Interactives
Thomas Lisle
Interpretations, London, UK
t@interpretations.co.uk
www.interpretations.co.uk

What are the possibilities for non-immersive, easy to use interactives, which combine visualisations, vr photography, and interpretation, and how can they be applied to the museum and heritage site visitor experience. This presentation will look at a trail produced for the former Royal Commission on the Historic Monuments of England, on the Queens House, in Greenwich London. What the effects of the trail were, and the conclusions that were drawn from it, and how a product was developed from the trial run.
The presentation looks at how navigation around a building and different time periods can be achieved, how analysis of different time periods can take place and how the site as a whole can be evaluated, with various types of VR. As well as how interface design, and user experience can be developed.
The presentation will also look at the benefits of XML controlled interactives, how databases can be used with interactives and XML, and how a modular structure to interactives is essential.

Sint-Baafs Cathedral
Wim De Boever, Serial Vision bvba
WimDeBoever@SerialVision.be
Marc De Mey, University of Ghent
Marc.DeMey@Ugent.be 

The Sint-Baafs cathedral in Ghent at the time of Van Eyck and today (a 3D computer reconstruction originated from a collaboration between prof. Marc De Mey, Ghent University, and architect Wim De Boever from Serial Vision)

For several years a research group at the university of Ghent has been studying the perspective as a scientific and artistic innovation. After an earlier focus on Masaccio’s Trinity fresco (around 1425) in the Santa Maria Novella in Firenze as the most important Italian achievement in that respect, the current interest is mainly on Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (around 1430) in the cathedral of Sint-Baafs. First, a reconstruction was made for the Vijd chapel, the location where the Ghent altarpiece was installed when it was completed. Within that space, the panels of the painting are shown within the hinged frames according to the original setup. Because the project assumes that Van Eyck attached more importance to lighting than to perspective, the primary focus was on the orientation of the light. To allow for a more detailed analysis of light effects, the reconstruction project was gradually extended. The 3D model was enlarged with the chapels of the choir and, later on, the entire choir to achieve a model of the church at the time of Van Eyck (only the Gothic choir was completed during the first decades of the 15 th century, the lower church was still Romanesque). The 3D computer model allows a view on the church with the texture of plastered walls that was almost certainly present in the 15 th century and without the baroque decoration added in the 17 th century. To indicate the current location of the polyptych, recently the model as been further expanded and includes the Gothic lower church as well. As such, the researchers now have a complete and very detailed 3D-model of the Sint-Baafs cathedral, allowing for exploration and animated fly throughs from every possible viewpoint, both for the interior and for external views.