Start. Welcome, everyone, to the digital launch of the Encoding
Heritage Network. Just to note that today's session will be recorded.
My name is Leah Kostner and I'm a junior research fellow in the history of art at Merton
College. To get it together with today's presenters and members from several
departments of the university, we are launching the Encoding Heritage Network,
which is kindly supported by TORCH, the Oxford University's Humanities Research
Centre. So the aim of this network is to connect scholars from the humanities,
social sciences and applied sciences who are interested in harnessing the power of 3-D
mapping. Photogrammetry and virtual environments such as virtual reality,
an argument and reality in their research. And we will be unveiling
an exciting series of events over the summer and in the next academic year,
which I will detail at the end of the presentation. Everyone is welcome to join. And
although events are free of charge, of course. So just a word about the structure
of the event today. We will be listening to two presentations from Matthew Nichols
and from Richard Smith, each of which will last about 20 minutes each.
At the end of these, we will open the floor up to questions. And we aim to end around
four p.m. So you're welcome to pop your questions into the Q&A box,
which you should see at the bottom of the screen throughout the presentation. And we will pick this up
at the end. So without further ado, I have the pleasure of introducing today
one of our network's founding members, Professor Matthew Nichols. He will be sharing today
an innovative use of 3-D modelling in his research. So Professor Matthew
Nichols is senior tutor at St. John's College in Oxford. He
previously held the lectureship Ed Najarian Classics at the University of Redding.
There, he developed a large scale 3-D model of ancient Rome, which he has used extensively in
teaching, research, outreach and in commercial work, winning several national
awards for teaching and innovation. And today, Matthew will be presenting
to us this work. Welcome, Matthew. Thank you very much, Leah. And
also and talk to everyone who supported this made it possible. And thank you very much,
everybody who's come along. It's the first time I've given a talk to an entirely absent and disembodied
audience. So I'm colour out there and I hope we have a very productive and enjoyable afternoon.
I'm going to try and share my screen now with you to show you some pictures
of the work that I've been doing. So there it goes.
And I hope that you can all see that perhaps Lee or somebody could just give me a wave
their thumbs up and cheque that the slide is coming through properly.
And he won a thumbs up. Brilliant. Thank you very much indeed. Okay, so really,
I said I have made a large scale digital model of ancient Rome. I'm a classicist and an ancient historian
and not really an archaeologist. And my technical training information is all in classics
in Latin and Greek, not in computer modelling. So I've taught myself as I've gone along, and although
that makes me in some ways a rather bumbling amateur in this field. It also means that
I have learnt as a non-specialist and therefore can teach other nonspecialist how to work with the software
and to think from a disciplinary standpoint, the classic standpoint about what it can offer and how we can use
it in various sorts of applications. So what I propose to talk about is how
I've done this and what I've done it for and where I think it might go next. And I'd
be very interested, as always, to hear people's questions or comments at the end. I'm going to
run these slides in this window here. I find that makes the videos play little more smoothly.
I'm sorry, I'm not getting a full screen, but hopefully you'll be able to see the slides that I want to show you.
So this is the model of Rome that Leah mentioned to you in the introduction. It shows the ancient
city, as it appeared or may have appeared in the early 4th century A.D. when Rome was at
its height. It contained several tens of thousands of artefacts, including buildings and about
35000 pine trees. And there we are flying into the city from the south.
So that gives you a hope, an impression of what it is that I'm talking about. This is the large model of Rome.
And what I'll proceed to talk about is how I made this and what I've used it for and some of the how and
some of the why. The basic modelling tool that I've used throughout this
project is called SketchUp, and this may be familiar to many of you. It's a very user friendly,
very approachable, rather fun piece of software, I find. And you can see in the window here,
it might be a bit jerky for you. But what you're looking at is a slightly speeded up screen grab
with me making a simple Ramano British villa in SketchUp. So you can see I've stopped with a grand plan.
I've drawn the outline of the building. I've Push-Pull pulled extruded up into three dimensions. I'm now adding
rooms and this little building on the side is probably a bathhouse. So a series of fairly simple
draw tools. Our circle here, a rectangle and then a Push-Pull to turn it into a cuboid.
OK, push called turn it into a barrel vault. You can create pretty quickly
at least a massing model, kind of volumetric model of this sort of building, telling it from a ground plan into
a 3D entity. And as this video plays on, you'll see a little bit of detail added. I don't know how long I let
it run for, but I'll start adding some colour and texture to it. Some windows and doors from a premade library of windows
and doors so dark as the roof tiles. So this is this is what I do. This is the process. It's speeded up by about a factor
of four. This is a two minute video. So it's an eight minute build. And you can see there for that will be
a very simple, very basic model you can make really quickly and you can turn a grand plan that maybe
not everybody can read very easily into something that's a bit more intuitive and a bit
more user friendly for some sorts of audience. Oh, this is a here's one I made earlier, cheap. So I've got
got a kind of library here of room and doors and windows. I'm pasting in to give a quick impression
of fenestration and it wasn't so very good. So that's the tool that I'm using as a very
simple model. You can apply it, though, to more complex models that take more make minutes to build.
Here is the Batho Caracalla in Rome. This is the best surviving
imperially or a Roman bathhouse. And like all of these mature bathhouse buildings, it's an extremely
complicated series of intersecting geometric volumes with curvilinear, vaulting
and big windows and also kind of occupation elements and columnar elements, marble decoration
and complicated polygonal bolting on the on the ceilings.
Really lovely building. And I set myself this is a deliberate challenge to kind of push my abilities,
at least in the modelling software, to the limits. What I'm doing here, there is still what I was doing in that
previous life. It's taking archaeological grand plans and a lot of flight photography and visits on
my part to turn what you can see in the top left of that slide, a kind of bare brick and concrete set
of ruins into what you can see at the bottom, which is a building with the ceilings restored
and the decorative elements are coming back in, then the windows are coming back in. And then when that will cut it up
and rendered, it will produce hopefully a very vivid impression of the bathhouse externally and internally.
And here is that impression. So there's the building finished coloured in entourage elements
like trees added. You can see that there's a nice kind of golden evening light playing on it,
which gives some shadows, a cast there by the trees and by the building itself, which gives it a sort
of 3D pop out of the page. And it's sitting not in isolation, but in a landscape
that I've made surrounded by other buildings that I've made that are based on maps
and control maps of ancient Rome. So it's the building in its urban context.
And the idea is that you can view things in isolation or you can drop them into a landscape and see them talking
to and corresponding with other buildings. And that's going to be important later. When we talk about how this building
helps us understand the city of Rome as opposed to individual buildings within that city.
So working from archaeology and from published site Clarens and some some other sources that I'll come to
building by building, I constructed the city model over time. Why have I done
this? Partly because it was fun. It's part of the honest answer. I played with Lego
a lot as a child. It's just it's enjoyable. But a more serious answer,
or at least a more kind of what we say focussed answer is that it corresponds, I think, to certain
teaching needs and certain research potentials and to a sense of exploration within the discipline
that's still unfolding. So the way that we conventionally document and teach
these Belton's just from two dimensional black and white grand plans like the one you can see top left there. That's another bathhouse
in red buzzer dilation, very similar building slightly later in date. And you can
see around that plan on the slide three other media that have been used to
try and give this more vivid impression of the building, because that ground plan is very, very information
rich. It's a very good diagrammatic way of presenting information. If you can read it, it tells you a lot, but not everybody can
read it. I find the undergraduate students, tourists when I'm doing this for
public audiences, people in kind of museum talks and so on. If you say who feels happy reading that grand
plan, I'm not. Half the hands will go up. It's not an intuitive
form of information to turn that in the mind's eye into something like the bottom right picture, which is a
19th century French watercolour. Bows are tradition, which shows that same building
presented as an interior view with perspective and volume and height and colour and lots
of little tastefully semi-nude Romans gambling around at the bottom in the bathhouse hall. And
that fills in a lot of the stuff that the grand plan is missing. But it does so at a price, which
is you can't see all the building currency part of it. The scale
is now gone because for Shorten is perspectival so that the plane recedes into the plane of the picture.
You can't make measurements from it. You might feel that it takes a degree of artistic licence.
Well, we all do. But you know that that's something we can talk about methodologically. So you can out in
black and white 3-D drawing like the one at the top. Right. You can add in physical models like go on bottom left
part of a city scale physical model in the museum in Rome. It's now shot. And the fact
that that museum models and accessible has been for some time shows the limitations of physical
models. And they're beautiful things, wonderful artistic and scholarly creations. But you can't
always get to them. And even if you can, you're going to make a trip to a museum. So into that mix of
traditional tools, we can add digital modelling. And there is my model, the same
bathhouse. And I wouldn't say this replaces a lot of other techniques. I say adds to them.
You can do stuff with that. You can more easily do stuff with it than with
other media. So here is that reconstruction. I made partially transparent overlaid on Google Earth.
And if I were showing you the full slide that care, this kind of animates the fading animation. And as you can see,
the bones of the bathhouse kind of giving fossilised expression in the modern city streets and that we
tried that earlier and it started too much. I won't play the animation, but you can perhaps see
just from the picture on the screen here. This sense of how the bathhouse sits within the modern city.
There's traffic island up here. That kind of semicircle of modern shocks you can see actually follows very closely the
semicircle in the outer wall bathhouse. And we can use that same model
to transition now from a planned view, which I've already said is kind of limited in
some ways. Deliver a useful same model gives us both the plan view and through animation. A perspectival
view so we can now move down an imaginary camera track in the sky and
go from an overhead view into something more 3-D. So you've got height and depth and perspective.
Colour in this you can see maybe that the water is reflective so we can assign different properties to different sorts of surface
so we can start to give now much more intuitive impression of the building that
people find helpful in various contexts. And I think it's a good addition to that traditional suite of
tools like painting or physical model making that archaeologists have been using for some centuries.
You've seen there the idea of almost immersive 3-D flying into a building, we
can take that right down to ground level. Here are some different bits of ancient Rome seen from a Raymonds.
I have you or nearly. So we're now starting to approach this idea of my city, which we'll
talk about later in virtual talk about a lot more about using the model to move away
from the kind of traditional God's eye view that you see in textbooks or print articles where that kind
of panoptic view over the whole city down to a much more ramen's eye view that shows
what these structures look like from the ground, what you can see from where, what buildings masked or accentuated
or pointed to other buildings or the sightlines are what the crowd experience is like.
So we can start doing that sort of thing from within the model. And now we're still only
talking at the moment about rended images. These ones are still you seen moving ones. We'll talk about
true immersive interactive, a massive city towards the end of this. And Richard will pick up on that in his tool,
his talk. Here is more of God's eye view. Sorry, I expanded
the slides unthinkingly. Can you still see my slide deck? Is that still in the right frame
for everybody? I've got a thumbs up,
two thumbs up call. Okay. Thanks, guys. So this is the Roman forum.
So where we're using the model here to fly slowly over a space and just see the buildings gently unfold beneath
us so you can kind of put your gaze on different structures. You can see how they sort of open up
as you move through them. The idea of motion through space is very interesting in classical scholarship now,
and I think I'll show you some books on that in a minute. That idea of being able to move through
a move over a space and her movement articulates the armature of the city and the building arrangement different. It
is very valuable here, though. I'm doing what I think of as 4D modelling. So
if we take the form buildings away and we look at Rome before the city of Rome was there, you can see these hilltop Iron
Age villages with the roads between the meeting in this marshy lower.
Graham, down here, I trust you can see my mouse pointer pointing at this some kind of deliberately between
the Palatine and Capricorn Hills. And if y if you're looking at the proper slides, I would slowly fade
in the modern city, modern 4th century city. Instead, it will just appear. But try and hold
that landscape in your mind's eye. There you go. I'll do it again. There is
the pre urban Rome with hilltops and marsh land and there is
modern Rome. And you can maybe see under that forum piazza that we just flew over is down in that marshy land. That was
once the meeting point between different separate hilltop villages. That's the aim of that slide. It's,
as I said, four dimensional modelling. That is the idea of change over time within the 3D space. I find quite
intriguing as a possibility. I'd like to do more of that. So that's
some of what I've done. How have I done it? What sources have I used to rattle through this little
little quickly? I could do and have done whole talks on this, as you might imagine. But I'll give you the
plot. It highlights you saw before that we use archaeology fairly obviously where there are
standing remains of a building. I go and look at them and photograph them and read people's
books about them and incorporate them as best I can into the model. You will find
if you do this that lots of published sources with maps and actually disagree with each other about where buildings are
positioned or what they look like or exactly where they fit into the modern city. So there's an awful lot of
choosing to do and guessing in some cases to do or at least kind of making educated estimates
of how to reconstruct from ruins. But where you have good standing remains like this inside a building
often left. That's a brick and concrete multi-storey Roman apartment block
you could use there. Standing remains to make a pretty good approximation of what the building was like when it was
new. There it is. No roof on it yet in that model. But you can see perhaps
kind of how that kind of hunk of brick and concrete down there,
which was preserved by being turned into a church as almost anything well-preserved in Rome, was, as you can
still see the church frescoes and belltower in there. How when it was built, that was actually
multistorey apartment block with shops on the ground floor, apartment living spaces
on the top floors. Very few of those survive in Rome. Very, very few survived. Or at least
if they do, they're kind of in globin and built into modern buildings. So you can go outside of Rome
and look at comparable sites like Austere Rome's harbour town down the Tigris River.
And Ostia survives much better. It was filled up with some drifts
when the harbour silted up and was just abandoned for centuries. So it's very, very well preserved. And here you can see
streets lined by those multi-storey brick apartment buildings and the paving stones are still there.
The steps and the shops and the green mills are still there. So you can go to comparable sites outside
of Rome if you want to. You can look at the evidence on things like coins. Here is
a Roman Emperors coin showing the Temple of Concorde in the Roman forum. And that's what I used to make
my model of the Temple of Concorde, including the statue placements. Coins are small and round
and buildings are big and square. So they're an imperfect source visually. And the
money I will distil water, emphasise certain elements to get a particular message across. But still,
it's it's a very useful, iconographic source. My favourite source
for this project is the digital divide and Marble Map mentioned Rome pre digital technology,
carving a map into marble slabs which were fixed to a wall in a monument in Rome and then fell
off in an earthquake and were smashed up into these jigsaw puzzle fragments.
And sometimes we can take a fragment like this one or a series of fragments. And you can see the detail, I
hope, of the buildings on there. The dots are maybe columns and you can see staircases. You can see a street
running across left to right on the top of the slab, you see a staircase climbing a hillside on
the left hand edge. Sometimes we know where on the map that there is these fragments fit into
a street called Vicas Trickiest that runs up the side of the Mantle Hill. And we can locate
that fragment. Pretty accurate, actually, as to where it should be in the city. And so I've made all those buildings
that are shown on the map and put them into the model. And there they are kind of in the same orientation, if you
can see that climbing that. Side with the big arterial road running along the bottom
of the diagonal bottom of the picture here. And the buildings climbing up the hillside to this building with this triple hedge
here. This big square structure here at the top of these slabs. And it's concentric rings
of what I take to be flaunting elemental planting. So this map is a beautiful resource
throating resource ready to use. And what I've done is take all the nine fragments of it, make the buildings on them in three
days and put them into the map. I don't think that's been done before. So that is a nice thing
to do. And a nice source to have gives us maybe 10 percent of the city. So obviously, a lot of the rest of the city
is various forms of conjecture. But what it does give us is the kind of texture, as I think of it, in the city, the rhythms
and density and building mix. So taking all those different evidence types together,
this is several years work in about 30 seconds as I build in and Coleraine and think
about the buildings, experiment with planting trees and background colours. And so there we go. So that's how the model
came to fruition. Give you that again, filling in those gaps, using different sources, thinking about the role
of colour, which is a whole other subject, and thought we could have thinking about the role of planting of
kind of ground plate texture and then working so quickly at the end. Now,
that's how some of the why, as I've said, this fits into trends and current scholarship that are about
what we call the spatial turn or what is called the spatial term. Thinking about movement, about experience,
space, stepping away from this, reading a monument like you'd read a text as a kind of set of
aggregator of symbols and messages and starting to think about the lived experience of walking through it or under it
or around it. And it seems to me that a digital model of this sort is a kind of laboratory
for exploring the spatial term in real time within an urban environment, especially when we get into
immersive tech, which Richard will talk about. We can do stuff like sightline
studies or illumination studies with it. So this is a theatre in room and the little tiny text in the
top of the slide is an extract from an inscription that sets out some imperial
games that happened in this theatre, amongst other places, and actually give us the date and time at which the games have happen. So
what I've done is animate that date and time in the model using the sun engine in the model, and you can see that
it puts the sun right on the stage. This is a looping video. So at the beginning of the designated
hour of games, you can see the sun plays onto the stage. The plays happen for an hour or so at the end of the
hour that almost like the shadow, falls like a curtain across the stage, which I think is very neat and
rather thrilling to find by just making a model and turning the sound on and seeing what happens. So we can use it for research
and use it for teaching. I teach undergraduates to make their own models of Roman still trust us. So here is undergraduate
work. This is people who had never done any digital work at all. About 10 weeks
later, after the end of a term at Redding, they were making models like this. I think it's pretty teachable software.
I think the methodology that I've been outlining quickly in this talk is it's also teachable and
we can use it for outreach. And the biggest way I've done this is to make a free online course for Muc on the Future
platform, which you're all very welcome to join. It runs again next month. About 40000 people
are taking this now, and this course contains five weeks of video. We
went and shot some films in Rhode Island and I made some digital model videos. We kind of blended them together.
And it contains written articles and discussions and things like that about the ancient city.
And for me, the best thing or the most innovative thing we did in this course was this, which is to make a series of buildings
from the model available for people to explore within the course on their phones
or tablets or desktops. This is a screen grab of me exploring that part of Caracalla that we started
with in an article, Cuba to Go. I can turn the colour on and off. I can
turn the sun around a little slider to play with the elimination, the shadows. And I can do a little Google
walk mow today as my little man and I can drop him into the model and that puts me in and I can now
tap to walk forwards. I can Massaro finger around on the screen to
kind of explore the model. And this principle of impossibility is really, really crucial. It's something that Rich is going to pick
up on that. It's all very well to look at the pictures as we've been doing right through the slide set.
I think people gain an awful lot more as I did through the process of building these models. But being inside
the 3D space and you choose where you want to look, you control that on the phone with your
finger or if you're in a VR headsets, we'll see in a minute by physically looking around. And that
addition of motion and choice and interactivity for MIJ enormously
magnifies the potential of this technology to show you what a space is like, make you feel what a space is like.
So I'm really excited by the steps that you're going to hear from Richard next about how we can do
this. And the building that he'll be talking about a bit is this one the theatre of Pompeii, which
feels to me like a really good building for testing this technology in because it's extremely big and
grand. It was built in 55 B.C. from the proceeds of the general
puppy's triumph as military victories came back to Rome and built Rome's first permanent
stone theatre before them. That only been made of wood because. Entertainment architecture sort of frowned
on his populist and rabble rousing and a bit unseemly. But here, promptly built for the first time this
magnificent stone theatre. It doesn't survive well at all now, which makes it
a great target for reconstruction, because we know a lot about it, but it's not there. So it's really nice to make a vivid 3-D
model of it. What you can see perhaps in the map top right is this fossilised imprint of the theatre.
If you look at this curve at the left of the map that there's a two city blocks there and that
curve right there built on top of the curve of this theatre. This bowl of seating here. So
the imprint of this building survives. And you can see it's absolutely enormous. And I found in my experiments
with immersive technology and with VR that that sense of scale and enormousness
is a little bit hard to capture on a two day monitor where you can just zoom in and out like a scroll wheel. It really
comes alive when you're in something like a VR headset and you're moving around the building at walking pace. And
look, you're telling your head to look around that suit. That building feels to me like a really tempting target
to try and do something even more interactive and imaginative with using specialist technology.
Or I have to rely on experts like Richard, which is a value of a network like this. So
that's me. And I think Richard and I are going to tell you his end of the story and then maybe we can have a discussion
afterwards. But thanks very much for your attention so far.
Thank you so much, Matthew, for that wonderfully rich presentation. So now
I have the pleasure of welcoming Richard Smith, who is technology support officer
at the board, the ad library where he provides a technology support overseas
3D printing and advises on 3D modelling and E.R. and VR projects.
Richard is also the co-founder of the Oxford XBRL, the hub, which is
Oxford Central Resource for Virtual an argument and reality. And today, Richel
will describe to us how he has used the model, which was created by Matthew, to build a virtual
reality application which allows users to experience and explore ancient
historical sites firsthand. So I will now turn it over to Richard.
Everyone saying, I mean, yes, he slides, OK? I
run, see these slides. All right. I keep saying
thanks for the introduction there. So you might.
Be hidden with the 53 people, beady eyes on the right hand side, there's a they are headsets
there, but a lot people ask, you know, why is this tech in the
eye? Paul, the 14. And this is something we
have a history of duty to doing where we bring in a new tech,
whether it was a a eyepatch back, whether when they first came out or
a 3D printer. And we made it easy to to
use and easy to get access to as well. So
students, staff. And if you're ever in Austin University,
can I come in and try it out or take a time as well? So
fixing on the PBB arse side of things. We we have
a a a lending service, so we would count the the
headsets for people to take back to their lab or they they could come in
to the library and, you know, try it out, they can book it for
a few days and work on a project there.
And then the the help as well. This is something I started about three
years ago. We with a group of people in a
in the university who wanted to kind of create this this
this space for people in the field to come together and talk about
what they were doing, because that was
local laws. Most people kind of doing small bits of our work, but we were
kind of separated. So we stopped this to come together. And from
those first kind of things like events we did, one of the first things people wanted
to do was actually learn how to make these these apps. So we started
a teaching course in the I.T. Learning Centre Success Centre.
And this is a term, a term because we run. Oh,
obviously now we we come to do that. So we're looking into lot all
online version of this as well. Where why what what were you hoping to get us
up and running soon from by those courses.
A lot longer model. A lot of people wanted us to kind of advise on projects after
the courses. So that's why when we started doing that, we did kind of
come in and consult on the app throughout the process or
we would build the app for four four four four four for them from scratch.
And again, they this is all based around the feedback we had from everyone
who comes to all like events and courses and things like
that. And it's also worth mentioning this is something we do just in
our my spare time as well. So if anyone likes the sound of this after
the presentation, it wants to be involved and just let
us know as well. So what is a massive tech?
Most people kind of instinctively associate it with the middle picture, what you
put on something on your face and it looks futuristic and
wave your hands around. But there are lots of other types
of tech which kind of fall in this as well. I'm the one people who tend to kind of forget about because
it's so ingrained in my life. Is there a phone?
So especially now that that that that that there are apps which will kind of augment
your your life side. For example, on Zoom, I can change the background,
but with these apps, you can get a virtual cypher in your
house and see if it fits. Now, if the colour works and lots
and lots of things like that, which she kind of kind of forgets about because it's so kind of ingrained
in the way we live now. But I'm just going to focus in on
the obvious side of things today. So if you haven't kind of used it before.
This is where it gets a bit tricky for me because. No, because we normally like to just,
you know, demo these because it's a lot easier just to show you. But I'm going to try my best to kind of explain.
Well, what what's is. So the way it works is you put on
a headset and a kind of fakes a a virtual
world around you. And this is done with your sight. So you have
a display where you're kind of projects light into your eyes. And you have
a separate view for your left eye. I don't want your eyes, so then you get the full 3D
view and then that gives you the sense of depth. So, as they say, can kind of understand the distance
of the space you go in and then they kind of car out on this, which sounds
on your hand. If you could control it so you can pick things up
so that they're that would look at these like extra steps he can
take to make it feel like you're out there. So
I'm sure most people, if you the seen one of these or they've tried them up themselves. But I
saw I would go over quickly what different headsets are and
and what you know, because, you know, the kid did it in about about most of them. And so on.
The kind of the cheaper side is a a a a cardboard
set. So these are exactly what I call the piece of card with
these, you know, cheap plastic lenses in there. And then all
we do is slot in your phone in the front. And then you put it on and then you just kind of rotate
around, but you can't really doing much else beyond that. But the good thing
about these, are they any cost about five pounds. So they tend to give them out for free with kind of
marketing things and stuff like that. That is a good way to kind of first test things
out. And then if you kind of want to go to the next step, you have these kind of mid-range
mobile ones. So there are some someone
the way this works is it's kind of plastic, which is kind of like glass lenses there, but
you still have to run it from a phone. But they will specify which version
of phone you can use. So it tends to be the, like, flagship
funds just to make sure everything runs smoothly. But again, you can't it kind of rotates
around. And then the latest version of
headsets which are coming out, not all of these kind of self-contained ones.
So the way these work is, they have a lot chips built into them. So you don't have
to put in your iPhone. And all you do is he puts on the headsets and then
everything runs through that. So the good good thing about this is it also can track the way you are in your
room so you can walk around. You've got hand controllers and interactive things as well.
And then finally, the ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. High end is all run from
a P.C. So the downside to this is mainly the cost.
And you can't really carry this around with you. Like you can with the others
cities. That's not only costs about five hundred pound to I
can get over a thousand pound if you get all the, you know, the extra fee fee because different features
with them. I mean the P.C. you need is normally about a thousand pound and that's kind of
the in the biggest step that is the P.C. But the good
good thing about this is the quality he you can get from these
headsets. So like I was just say sexist and some I wanted to
help, you know, visualise this because we can try this out. But the mobile ones, you can just
kind of look around, but you're kind of stationary and still, whereas the
P.C. wants you. You also have to be extra free. Freedom to walk around the. Of space.
So what? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This would look like is you would kind of
kind of corner office space in your room. Way you can freely walk around without bumping
into things. And then the sensors will be able to track you in that space and then they
will tell you if you get too close to the edge. So
this gives you the freedom. It's kind of walk around the space. I'm not seeing the bigger ring have the
best day. This is. And again, just kind of help
me visualise. I thought I was just. Play this video.
So this is just kind of a fun game, which you can buy with the
headsets here. And if he move the video, you can see there's a guy in the bottom right corner that
with with the chef headsets on and he's got to hand controllers. But you can see how quickly
he's kind of interacting with things, which is something you can really do with non-traditional
games. You have to figure out which, but no buttons to press if I'm allowed to actually
pick this up. Whereas with the PR, you know, it's kind of a natural thing
just to use your hands so you don't really have to think, oh, how does this well, you just kind of
instinctively get used to it and you can see how, you know, precise.
These men had me make me leave and saw how quickly he can kind of get lost in
this space. Somalia appropriate, but on on
media, get to the more practical pass things. So this is just a show.
Fifita goes by all of a practical use in the medical
parts so that there is a lap he will using
and they are here to kind of help people with kind of extreme phobias of heights.
So I might be a bit scared actually leave the house so you he
can take these to take you through them to actually train with. This is probably
the most at the last level, but you can certainly go
through these steps of practising in your safe space time
in vehicles, CPR. But if you your brain enough to kind of trigger those
responses where you really feel like you're up at heights. And I'm sure if if
anyone here has tried a real app, when you're standing up in excess of a high, you can really
feel without, you know, the rush of standing on the edge of itself somewhere.
So how is all of this made? So this kind of feed, main parts, so the
engine. So this I will talk a little bit more
in a second. But he admits he is kind of the one we use.
It's like a software package. And then you need a way to actually create the
assets which can go in there. So the you know, the buildings like Matthew has made
you, you can bring them into the source software. But you also, you know,
you have to make things like sound and art and that kind of thing. So there's
no there'll be there's a whole page of nice software which you would be able to use to. And they
bring in a model or sound or anything like that.
And then if anyone codes, you can use a C shop and get
to a source, control the project. If that means nothing to you. But that's
fine as well. So this is just kind of a visual way to look at what
I just said. Say you've got to think of unity
is where, you know, you bring all of these parties together from unite, different tools.
So I SketchUp, you can you bring this into it?
So what is he, unity? So what is kind of most famously
useful is no video games. I am
the real reason people he he use it is because he can make one kind of project
and then, you know, save this to, say, a PlayStation, a P.C., a mobile
phone. No, they are headsets as well. So you can build them all in one
place and then save it to, you know, different devices. But
the thing I like most about it is just how quickly you can prototype things.
So the best thing about unity is I don't have to say you understand how
physics works. I don't have to programme in net gravity. I just turn turn
it on with a checkbox. You don't have to know how light bounces around the scene. You just put
it in the light so that there are a lot of these kind of complex things which it already does
full, fully eye. And all you have to focus on is the content
inside the. And with the off,
the thing we want is kind of real time. We're rendering. So if if
if you might imagine, you have the headsets on me, move your head really quickly. You want that to
update as quickly as possible so it feels smooth and it doesn't throw
you off. So that's why these game engines are really good, because
they can really render things really, really quickly. So how
would you kind of put this together for this Roman model? So
Matthew sent me the mom, mom, mom model and hopefully the first thing I do is I
bring in my own 3D package and just have a look at it. And I'll say the first thing you
see from this kind of God-Fearing is this rich detail
and just the scale of it. Now, the first thing I want to do is kind of feel like
what it would be to send it back just because it I bet that there is so much going on
here. So just going in a little bit closer. We still on.
That's my human scale. This is still live. But looking at it like, you
know, far away. But just from my own way of thinking with
you. E unity. So one of the first things
that came to my mind was, well, that, you know, that that there is all of these kind
of basic lighting which happens, but it doesn't fit with, you know, every scene you
get together. So if I was gonna walk around this space, someone's gotta see every corner
of this model. So I would just have to fix the lighting
in the background so they can see that better. That's the shade. And it's always just worth
mentioning. If you're just throwing some something together, you can just skip most of
this pop. But this is just the way we think when you're building a app.
And then the next thing is, if I was kind of looking back
later on the got you these kind of hedges look fine and they kind of e. He
can make out the shapes well. But because you're not kind of facing them
head on, they don't really matter no matter. But once you get down to ground
level, these hedges are actually going to be one of the first things you
see and they'll be quite met. I see. So I just wanted to increase
the air quality here. And this is something we can do.
And then finally, this is more of like a technical night is if your model
or you 3-D data, you have works in a a different pieces sorts
of social stuff. So SketchUp, you wouldn't actually be able to see through this part of the model,
but just the way you see unity works. You can't
be a model in a certain way. So there were
just some, you know, technical problems which you would pick up on Straight's. So it's just worth noting.
You have to kind of inspect things, you know, closely on the first time you bring
in. So the asset still is something
built into the software as well. So this is what I use to
a prototype with. If I don't want to spend ages building everything from
scratch. So what we can do is kind of search for things you wanted. So
I wanted these hedges to kind of replace these
the boxed all of them say you just go ahead and such fits. And this is
really handy if you don't have the time or you don't have the skills to actually build
a 3-D model. So these hands range from my
free ones, which are kind of average quality to really high high
quality assets, which they use in kind of high end games, which cost
quite a lot. So you kind of pay for what it is you wanted, which is fine.
But for a prototype, just using the free ones, I worked well.
And all we do is click, click on them and bring them in. So this is what it looked like
when I first bought it. And this is just what it looks like after kind of tweaking things around. But
we will get a better look at this once I show you that video of me with the.
There, that's one as well. But you can see the lighting there, especially
if I can kind of see everything.
And fun and funny, one of the things to mention is if you're interested in to do
this yourself, the headset you use will tend to provide you with a soft way.
You need to make the headset work in unity
so you don't have to programme every bar button that there is some kind of.
Linking things together to do, but you don't have to code anything. You just bring
this in. They give you kind of sample scenes which you can take things from perfect
into your project. So you can see. You can just kind
of track things together quite quickly without having to spend lots
of time building stuff from scratch or even knowing how the, you know, the
the hand tracking works you didn't really need. So you just have to know where to get it from.
Let me show you the video. So this was me the other day.
Yes. So this puts me
with the headsets on on the controllers as well in the
demo model with the updated post, so you can see up.
I have my hands and I other than this, a robot face, difficult to hopefully
try to help with a sense of scale. But it would be nice if those people
walking around as well. But you can really see the completely different perspective you have
of the model here just from having the headsets
on. And as always, was, you know, this is gone once you have the headset, when you
have full 3D fish. And so you have the real sense of depth, which you don't
get on a 2D screen. But you can see here, you know,
the the Bushes look a lot nicer than nice. Way you can come see through
them and peek through and see the fountain and things like that.
And it just screams and. And the way you move around is you can
see you have a side teleportation system. I mean, the reason for that is I have
a average sized room. I don't have the size of this. No theatre in my house.
So you need a way to be able to move beyond your physical bounds, which is why you
have this system where you kind of point away getting where you want to go. I mean,
the way you press the button. He then tacked together for that. So it enables
you to move around vast spaces like this where you can really just see how big
it is. And then you travel beyond your
physical bounds. But oh, he'll say, let let's see, teleport somewhere. And then your
you have your physical space, which he can walk around and feel wonderful for what it was like to walk in
space.
So just quickly, how do we know you get involved and learn this type of thing?
Southsea is a lot harder now where we can't do the the attorney
courses we run, but we are looking at doing a online version of
this scene. So if you're interested to know what the
Butterly and does the AVF, we just [INAUDIBLE] up like they are linking.
There's a lot more information about the headset's we have how to
use it and more about. Well, one or two, I spoke at the start
and then if you have a project in mind which you want to use pretty awful
and just contact the hub on the Web site there. Well, the address
at the bottom end of my presentation. Thank you for
listening. I think Leah will now take back control for our questions.
Thank you so much, Richard Matthew, for sharing it with us, this exciting research.
So we will.