Second Site

Bomb Sight

2012-12-07T13:16:00.000+00:00

As a child growing up in East London in the early 1970s I vividly remember the scattered derelict plots that were the vestiges of bombed-out buildings of the Blitz and the family stories that accompanied each, so and so was killed here, this bomb fell on such a date, the day the house was bombed, my mother pursued along the High Road by a marauding Messerschmidt. In our sideboard we had a scrapbook that held a copy of the bomb census map, published in the local paper just after the War ended. Fascinated I poured over it, looking for all the bombs that fell near our family home. So here is something rather special and evocative for me. Bomb Sight is an interactive map of the London Blitz, resulting from a JISC funded research project led by Dr Kate Jones in the Department of Geography at the University of Portsmouth. As well as being a fascinating piece of research, it is a great example of the power of GIS and web mapping to mash together disparate data to generate new insight and meaning, and has some really nice, clean cartography to boot.

Available via the project website and soon as an Android Ap with added augmented reality function, this is a very clever use of technology and personally carries me back to those childhood days of parental reminiscence and a not so distant and ominous past.

Beyond Red: MS Remote Sensing of Landscape

2012-12-06T23:14:00.001+00:00

Greatly enjoyed speaking at the Irish Quaternary Association annual symposium on Remote sensing: Applications in Quaternary Science, Archaeology and Landscape Management at the Geological survey of Ireland in Dublin. Among some outstanding contributions the work of the Geological Survey of Ireland on mapping Quaternary sediments stood out. The draft digital mapping was of exceptional quality and the maps themselves highly effective cartography. GSI make much of their digital data freely available for use via their website, which is an example to all providers of public data.

My own presentation,on work using multispectral and hyperspectral airborne imagery for archaeological prospection and mapping is on slideshare and available below.

Mind Maps

2012-10-06T01:20:00.001+01:00

I remember first coming across the idea of mental maps, maps that reflect how we perceive and negotiate the environment around us, rather than reflect real space or concrete spatial relationships as a geography undergraduate. I like this TED talk by graphic designer and cartographer Aris Venetikidis that elegantly describes how we mentally process space and movement through it and applies these concepts to the chaotic muddle of public transport in Dublin, The results are elegant, meaningful visualizations of movement through the real and mental space of Dublin. Impressive.

Found some stones in a field: A day of Stonehenge

2012-09-11T22:09:00.000+01:00

September 11th 2012, one day at Stonehenge, one day of visitors, one day of tweeted pictures. Found some stones in a field, definitely made by aliens...

Tweeting the Past

2012-08-20T17:47:00.003+01:00

Not so very long ago capture and analysis of the live stream of geolocated tweets using Twitters streaming API was at the cutting edge of social science research. Caught up in the wow of it all we (at Vista) built an application to capture the live stream and after a 50 day proving run had ourselves 1.87 million tweets to analyse.

50 days, 1.87 million geolocated tweets for the British Isles

Much of the analysis of twitter data has tended to focus on the spatial patters of use or the social networks revealed by the complex interrelationship of users We we interested primarily on information relation to heritage, what do people tweet about heritage subject, where from, etc. Results, it has to be admitted, were modest. Over 50 days only 22 tweets mentioning archaeology - including the wonderfully derogatory "goodness me archaeology is boring" (with more than a nod to Armstrong and Miller). More interesting were spatial patterns of tweets in relation to heritage imbued landscapes, archetypally tweets from Stonehenge, displaying wonder at the monument and often accompanied by tweeter links to pictures. This is richer fare for the study of reception of the past, and deserved more thought than we gave it at the time. You can read about our work in the presentation below and in our paper A software system for data mining with twitter Proceedings of 2011, 10th IEEE International Conference on Cybernetic Intelligent Systems, CIS 2011, pp. 139–144, 2011.

And now, barely a year later, everybody is grabbing and mapping the live twitter stream. Some of the applications are quite impressive, my personal favorite this live map of tweets from the Middle East, greatly revealing of the conflicts in Syria and elsewhere. What is still more astounding is that in the latest iteration of Bing Maps, Microsoft have added the facility to map live tweets against a Bing maps background. So, here, by way of experiment, live maps of all tweets from the Stonehenge area, and all tweets from the UK mentioning "archaeology". Remember, these are live maps and so most tweets will be sent during UK daylight hours especially from Stonehenge.

Why SketchUp Matters...

2012-06-09T19:00:00.000+01:00

Thinking about Google's sale of SketchUp a little more I begun to realize what makes me uneasy about this parting of the ways. It's not just the change of ownership from a company whose ethos I admire to one I am a little less comfortable with, its the fact that I think SketchUp, and particularly here I'm thinking about the free version, matters, and especially matters to the heritage community. A threat to SketchUp is a threat to digital heritage in general and the democratization of the study of cultural heritage, the wrestling of heritage recording from the hands of the expert into a skilled community.

As an example, let me introduce you to the work of Tom Harvey. I don't know Tom, we've never met, although I've used his work, the freely offered fruit of his labour with SketchUp, especially his excellent Stonehenge model. But what marks Tom's work out as exceptional is his steady methodical effort to single handedly create a digital version of his home town of Leominster, using SketchUp and sharing the results in the 3D Warehouse and on Google Earth. This is digital heritage at its best, an authentic record of a community and its architecture at a point in time emerging from that community. And what is the catalyst, well I'd argue it is the democratizing influence of SketchUp, its ease of use, its zero cost, its accessibility. Meddle with that model and I fear that both the ethos that prompts the work of individuals like Tom and the ability to create it, vanishes.

What's Up SketchUp

2012-06-09T08:43:00.002+01:00

Google have quietly parted company with their SketchUp product to Navigation company Trimble, best known for their range of navigation and survey grade GPS hardware. Now this raises all sorts of interesting questions. What are Google up to parting with a significant piece of the jigsaw that is the Google Earth hegemony? What are Trimble up to, not noted for their consumer grade or navigation GPS, with a corresponding requirement for 3D urban environments, why are they interested in SketchUp and what market are they aiming to break in to?

The sale of SketchUp has some interesting implications for users. For the time being, at least, Trimble have committed to honoring the free basic version of SketchUp and educational licensing, while obviously promoting the premium Pro version. More interesting are the implications for 3D Warehouse contributors as Trimble have acquired, along with SketchUp, the assigned rights to the Warehouse. Now this is interesting. Google are a company that pride themselves on making money without being evil and their support of the free product, educational and philanthropic funding and general goodness is manifold (although let's not be naive here, they get up to some less shiny stuff too). Trimble among their portfolio of products include a substantial defense element. Now, how do you feel about your carefully crafted 3D models working alongside an unmanned drone, say circling silently over the streets of Gaza or the West Bank...Just asking. Warehouse users have a limited period to op out of licensing their models to Trimble before its a done deal.

Mountains of Data

2012-06-06T09:21:00.001+01:00

Enjoying the work of Edinburgh based Dutch artist Eddy Van Mourik, seen on his blogs Field and Mountains of Data.

Eddy qualified from the Edinburgh College of Arts with a degree mixing visual arts, landscape architecture and the earth sciences (nice!). As well as working in game engines his present work involves an inciting blend of digital representation and the real world, I particularly like the reverse engineering of digital data into tangible real world art in pieces like NT 251732 (above). I find the idea of mixing real and digital exciting (in all its forms) and this sort of reversal of the augmented reality paradigm is a fresh approach with some challenging perspectives on both.

Dear Esther

2012-04-09T10:03:00.000+01:00

Dan Pinchbeck's Dear Esther, the seminal Half-Life 2 Mod funded by the AHRC has taken new life in this wonderful remodelling, undertaken in collaboration with Robert Briscoe at LittleLostPoly

The outstanding quality of the visual ascetics, narrative, music and voice acting of this superb little game cannot be emphasized enough, this is engrossing, though-provoking and moving interactive fiction at its best. What I really want to draw attention to and praise however is the sheer visual quality of the natural landscapes as modelling by Robert Briscoe, all the more astounding as this is accomplished in Value's Source, which while an accomplished engine isn't an obvious choice for natural landscapes (step up CryENGINE here). Briscoe's work is outstanding, technically amazing, scraping every last once of power from Source by stripping away all but the essential functions for this very low-key game. What most impressed me is the sheer ascetic popwer of the landscapes, particularly the outside spaces and uplands, and the tangible sense of place this embodies. This hypereal landscape takes on a salty, wind-swept solidity that is quite overwhelming at times. I cannot praise this game enough. If you haven't already, get it now.

Photosynth on the iPhone

2012-04-05T15:57:00.003+01:00

Microsoft Research are doing some pretty sexy things with visualization at the moment. I've greatly enjoyed their Image Composite Editor (ICE, now at version 1.4.4) and already extolled the virtues of Photosynth for creating panoramic images from sequences of game rendered stills. Trawling through the iOS App Store on my iPhone I was intrigued to discover an iOS version of Photosynth. This neat little App turns my iPhone into a significantly useful handheld panorama creator, limited only by the relatively low resolution of the iPhone's camera (well on my ageing 3GS anyway). The end results can be uploaded to Photosynth.net for sharing. I think the combination of iOS and Photosynth make a very capable device for capturing landscape and building panoramas. Here, by way of example a bit of playing at Whitby Abbey. I really like the ability to grab panoramas at will, in any circumstance that I can lay my hands on my iPhone, I can see lots of uses for this new toy - now, how can I lay my hands on a new generation iPad...

AgiSoft PhotoScan

2012-03-25T10:37:00.002+01:00

I'm impressed by this piece of work by former Birmingham Landscape Archaeology and GIS master's student Lawrence Shaw demonstrating the archaeological use of AgiSoft's PhotoScan photographic modelling software. This nice demonstration of the software is of rock art found at Al Jassasiyah, Qatar and is compiled from eight different photographs taken from a pole. OK, not landscape, but I'm very impressed by the fidelity of the model. PhotoScan can output models derived from appropriate photographs in a variety of 3D object formats as well as those suitable for digital elevation models. I for one will be downloading the demo version to take it for a run, maybe at a bit of appropriate landscape, as well as the more usual objects and structures.

Lumion 3D

2012-03-25T09:56:00.001+01:00

I've recently stumbled upon Lumion 3D visualization software, courtesy of the Digital Urban blog. The free version of Lumion produces stunning output and can import greyscale heightmaps (from ArcGIS) and building and object models in collada format, exported from SketchUp. Output is in the form of high quality still images or rendered movies, the free version of the software adds a watermark in the top left corner.

Above is a great example of the results achievable with the free version, this movie won the 2011 Lumion competition gaining a prize of $I0000 and a free copy of the software. I have yet to see an easier to use piece of visualization software and I recommend immediate download and playing in time for the 2012 competition!

Outerra and Mirror Worlds

2012-03-20T12:04:00.001+00:00

I'm grateful once again to the sharp-eyed Jack Hanson for pointing me, via New Scientist towards Outerra. Occupying a nice somewhere between Google Earth and Second Life, Outerra is a planetary rendering engine, allowing "seamless planet rendering from space down to the surface."

This is an interesting development, a true virtual world, unlike Google Earth for example which as an amalgam of remotely sensed data merely warehouses digital representations of the real world. I'm put in mind of David Gelernter's Mirror Worlds - there are endless interesting possibilities.

The free technical demo is certainly impressive and there is considerable potential here for visualizing one's own data using the sandbox tools provided as part of the paid for version.

Making Something Different

2011-11-13T08:49:00.001+00:00

Enjoyed speaking the the CBA East Midlands group in Market Overton yesterday. Part of a programme packed with interesting and varied stuff, including one again Dave Walker on the excellent Nottingham Caves Survey

Talking about using airborne lidar in landscape archaeology I think I spent too long dwelling on the relatively mundane choices of data visualization techniques and how they enhance our ability to identify and interpret archaeological information in lidar elevation models. But beyond traditional visualization is the enticing world of game-based immersive visualization of those same data, a better way to engage with the density and complexity of high-volume survey data. I was pleased that suggesting this approach went down well with a general non academic audience who (I'm sue I will be forgiven) were on the whole somewhat older than the usual conference audience. To me this seems hopeful proof that the concept of community digital heritage has some currency and that computer-based visualization is neither too esoteric nor too divorced from the common currency of community archaeology to find a place.

Different Visions

2011-09-21T00:51:00.001+01:00

Back to Laxton tonight, wearing a by now slightly unfamilar hat, to talk to the Laxton History Group about the past excavation and survey work in the village and castle.

I can't resist including one of the CryEngine visualizations of the castle survey in the presentation, and have settled for that produced in CE2:

It strikes me how different the same basic data looks in CryEngine 1:

Nothing deep here, but it strikes me as how CE1 has something of a cartoonish, fantastical feel about it. Now we may deride that as lack of photo-realism, something that undermines the authenticity of the visualization, and if we did we might have a point. But there's also something attractive about this, rather like naive art, the studied lack of realism invites a different kind of engagement and reject criticism for not looking real enough. This might just be my liking for the speed and simplicity of CE1 speaking, but if game based rendering of landscape is about more than simply realism (and I believe it is) then maybe naivety and a simple pallet have something to offer.

Stonehenge

2011-09-16T16:53:00.000+01:00

Two exciting pieces of research affecting Stonehenge have been pointed out to me and are too good not to pass on. The English Heritage funded 3D Stonehenge model has used high resolution terrestrial laser scanning to produced an unparalleled, accurate three-dimensional model of the stones.

Meanwhile, at Bournemouth University the team responsible for one of the recent campaigns of fieldwork at Stonehenge have completed the Google Under the Earth: Seeing-beneath-Stonehenge project. Funded by the Google Research Program. Birmingham Postgraduate Lawrence Shaw has worked on this project and blogs about it here.

Great work, and nice visualization in both cases.

Exploring Visibility and Atmospheric Occlusion in CryEngine

2011-09-08T20:52:00.000+01:00

The role of visual appreciation of landscape has taken a leading role in the archaeology of landscape, encouraged both by theoretical approaches and the utility of GIS softwares for automatic analysis of the visual characteristics of large landscapes. Various writers have critiqued GIS studies of visibility and proposed enhancements to and refinements of visibility studies (eg. Llobera 1996 and 2000; Ogburn 2006). In essence arguments for the refinement of visibilities studies focus on the need to appreciate the impact of range, view direction and target size on visibility. Additionally, a number of authors have pointed out the shortcomings of both theoretical and practical approaches to visibility studies, in particular the fact that many studies ignore or misrepresent the potential impact of vegetation and past vegetation patterns on landscape and visibility.

I have been experimenting with using CryEngine to model different degrees of visual occlusion of landscape, based on atmospheric fog and rain. Sandbox conveniently allows varying vegetation scenarios for the same landscape to be stored as layers that may be turned on and off to explore the visual impact of changes in vegetation. Sandbox's environment controls allow alteration of the character, density and occlusion distance of atmospheric fog and addition the impact of rain on visibility may be simulated through particle effects. The graphics here illustrate CryEngine simulations of the effect of increasingly dense atmospheric fog (with view distance decreasing from 200m to 500m) and the addition of rain on visibility of Stonehenge as viewed from The Cursus, a distance of just over 2km, and can be compared with a traditional GIS-derived two-dimensional viewshed diagram from the same location.

I think this approach has some potential for exploring changing visibility in landscapes where views and indivisibility are considered significant. I'll be exploring different vegetation patterns in a similar light in the near future.

Llobera, M. 1996. Exploring the topography of mind: GIS, social space and archaeology. Antiquity 70, 612-22.

Llobera, M. 2001. Building past landscape perception with GIS: understanding topographic prominence. Journal of Archaeological Science 28, 1005-14.

Ogburn, D.E. 2006. Assessing the level of visibility of cultural objects in past landscapes. Journal of Archaeological Science 33, 405-13.

Tara

2011-09-07T16:10:00.001+01:00

One of the nice things to come out of Technological Advances in Landscape and Heritage Management Recording has been the chance to collaborate with colleagues in Ireland on some experimental visualization.

I'm very grateful to the Discovery Programme for supplying some of their very high resolution Fli-Map airborne lidar (c.2m ground resolution) to play about with, including attempting a visualization of the iconic Hill of Tara in CryENGINE.

Tara is an interesting landscape to work with. The earthworks are well defined and the lidar data quite startling in its clarity, there are also numerous crowd-sourced ground level photographs to work from. Working in CE1 was a little disappointing, although layering textures from derivatives of the lidar terrain data (slope mapping, solar insolation modelling, etc) shows promise. Far better at the moment is CE2, with its much improved lighting and vegetation. Below is a rough render of the initial model, with more to follow in due course.

Getting the vegetation right here is key and requires considerably more work before even beginning to think about adding arcitectural detail. Great to have such fantastic data to work with.

The Weather Game

2011-08-25T23:10:00.004+01:00

How do we understand complex data and comprehend uncertainty? That's just the question that the UK Met Office are trying to solve with an attractive on-line casual game: The Weather Game, playable on their website for the next month.

The game present players with an imaginary (actually rather trite, but no matter) scenario and a variety of visualizations of weather predictions from which future actions need to be determined. How well you do in deciding your future action is obviously, to some extent, a reflection on how clearly data is presented to you and how uncertainty in that data is mediated, so that it is possible to take into account in decision making. Interesting resonances here for interrogation of climate change predictions. I wonder what a similar approach to comprehension of the UK Climate Impacts Programme UKCP09 models of future climate change based on different emission scenarios, might reveal, particularly in the ability of policy makers to comprehend and adapt. Well, this is a long way from games based visualization of landscape and heritage, but it is visualization, and after all what we are about here is trying to better understand landscape scale data. Recommendation: take a break from Crysis2, play the Met Office game, explore different visualizations and make a contribution to a useful piece of research at the same time.

The Scottish Ten

2011-08-19T11:42:00.001+01:00

More from Technological Advances in Landscape and Heritage Management Recording. The Scottish Ten is another fine example of a terrestrial laser scanning project of epic and imaginative scale producing beautifully visualized results. In its own words "A groundbreaking international 3D scanning project to digitally document Scotland’s five World Heritage Sites and five international ones". Work has employed a variety of scanning techniques to document sites as diverse as St Kilda, Neolithic Orkney and Mount Rushmore.

I'm particularly taken by the effectiveness of their translation of laser scanning from point cloud to photo-realistic models (viz the movie above) and crave more information on their methodology. The impressive pre-rendered visualizations are a great example of what laser scanning is capable of - but I'd love to see the same data ported to a game-engine for real-time interactive exploration.

The City Beneath

2011-08-16T10:20:00.009+01:00

As promised something on Dave Walker's Nottingham Cave Survey that so impressed me at Technological Advances in Landscape and Heritage Management Recording in Dublin last Friday. Dave and his team have been working on producing a comprehensive digital record of Nottingham's unique and relatively little known systems of man-made rock cut caves, the earliest survivors of which date to the Middle Ages, but for which there are far earlier accounts.

Using a variety of terrestrial laser scanning kit the team have worked on the "cave a day" principle to produce a stunning primary record. While there is little in time and resources to make too much of these data what Dave has done is produce some lovely, quite ethereal flythroughs using Pointools View Pro. Nottingham is my home city, and I've wandered through a few of the caves over the years; these visualizations perfectly capture the sense of strangeness that descent from sunlit city street to subterranean space creates - I'm always reminded of something faintly Lovecraftian "the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries" but that's just me...

Technological Advances in Landscape and Heritage Management Recording

2011-08-11T10:46:00.006+01:00

Here, for the record, my presentation given at Technological Advances in Landscape and Heritage Management Recording in Dublin on Friday. An excellent, useful and enjoyable day with some very interesting presentations, particularly focused on high resolution airborne and terrestrial lidar. I was really taken by the work of Dr Dave Walker on the Nottingham caves (good enough to deserve its own post, so more later) and the Scottish Ten, mysterious name, but great work, again deserving its own post. Since I managed to give the wrong version of my presentation, anyone interested in what I had to say will get a fuller picture from the below...

Recounting the Landscape: Laxton Castle CryENGINE 2

2011-08-07T08:12:00.006+01:00

Part of the aim of "Lasers, Landscapes and Muddy Boots" is to demonstrate the way in which game engines can place us as archaeologists physically within the landscape of our surveyed monuments, albeit virtually. As a demonstration I've produced this short walkthrough of our survey of Laxton castle, based on field collected GPS data.

Produced using CryTek's CryENGINE 2, it lacks the ludic elements of earlier CryENGINE 1 models of the same site, but has a greater degree of visual fidelity - it looks more like the real thing. Just the thing to get across the point that standing inside our survey data and rewalking the same fields, getting digital mud on our boots, may bring new insight. In the words of Tilley "To understand a landscape truly it must be felt, but to convey some of this feeling to others it has to be talked about, recounted, or written and depicted."

Narrative and Choice: The Stanley Parable

2011-08-05T07:45:00.003+01:00

Really enjoying the Half-life 2 mod The Stanley Parable. A great example of what is achievable using FP game engines when creativity breaks free of the predisposition to run and shoot things, this strange fractured narrative with its dominant narrator and meta narrator brings to mind Aldiss' Report on Probability A or the fracturing of narrative form and convention of some of John Fowles's novels (the ending of The Magus for example, when the a narrator suddenly appears to discuss choices and outcomes).

This is clever, intriguing stuff, done with flair but minimal fuss and with starkly simple visuals that point the player back to the experience of the unfolding narrative and the dominant voices of the narrators, confusing, commenting and instigating choice, while all the time undermining and questioning our freedom to really choose. Great stuff!

Games as Heterotopias

2011-07-31T08:56:00.004+01:00

Reading Michel Foucault's "Of Other Spaces" (Diacritics, Spring 1986) a lecture originally given in March 1967 and startlingly prescient of digital technologies and their potential for virtual spaces.

Foucault argues the concept of the heterotopia, a sort of anti utopia, a space simultaneously mythic and real defined by five principles. So, heterotopias are capable of juxtaposing in a single space several real spaces that are in themselves incompatible (a theatrical stage, for example), are linked to slices in time - heterochronies, where traditional concepts of time break down, and a spaces detached from the mundane world, in some senses private and requiring of formal entry and exit.

These ideas (and I know I am far from original in thinking this) seem to perfectly frame the concept of a free-form game of landscape and memory, in which a virtual representation of the real world (detached, theatrical and demanding formal entry and exit) unites incongruent spaces and times in a single virtual space. Imagine exploring a virtual landscape in which fragments of time and past space litter the present world and you have the general idea. Such fractured worlds are in fact common ground in many games, recall Gordon Freeman's jolting journey through other spaces in the latter part of the original Half-life, and are the meat and drink of works such as Dear Esther and Korsakovia. In fact in many ways all games that strive to represent the real world digitally are hetrotopias of a sort (Assassin's Creed's time and place jumping narrative is another example).

I like this concept of the breakdown of formal space and time into something more mysterious and demanding greater engagement to comprehend, as a structure it has much to ponder on in designing mythic-real game spaces for exploring heritage.