ArcheFOSS VIII proceedings finally online!

Hi all,

Thanks to the effort of +Filippo Stanco and Giovanni Gallo, are now finally online (as Open Access) the proceedings of  the eight ArcheoFOSS, which took place in Catania (at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University) in 2013 (here the ATOR related post).

The event was organized by the Image Processing Laboratory and the proceedings are published by ArchaeoPress, as open access (here the direct link).

Here below you can see the front cover:

The front cover of the publication

In this publication you can find some articles of ours and in particular the analysis of the Taung Project under the aspect of the Open Research (here the slide of the presentation) and +Rupert Gietl's report about the 3D documentation of archaeological underground environment, related with WW1.

Have a nice day!

“FACCE. I molti volti della storia umana”, an open source exhibition

It's been more than one year since the conclusion of the Taung Project and many things have happened. Today I want to post something related with one of the most important derivations of this project: the exhibition "FACCE. I molti volti della storia umana" (en "Faces. The many aspects of human history"). The event is organized by the Anthropological Museum of the University of Padua, from an idea of Dott. Nicola Carrara, and it is a cooperation between the Museum, the University, Arc-Team and Antrocom NPO (the same actors of the Taung Project). I will not go into details of the exhibition, due to the fact it is still a work in progress being its opening planned for October 2014, but I post the preliminary presentation we did during the European Academic Heritage Day 2013 ("Down the Rabbit hole", backstage of knowledge production).

 As you ague form the title, the main topic of the exhibition is the human face, which, in the words of the French photograper Gisele Freund, is also the "the only part of the body to be exposed naked to the first comer." Actually the thematic sessions planned for the event are six:

1. "Guardiamo in faccia la diversità umana" (en "Let's face human diversity"), which is dedicated to human evolution and will take advantage of the forensic facial reconstructions of the principal actors in the phylogenetic human three, preformed by the Brazilian digital artist +Cícero Moraes.

2. "Una faccia, una razza?" (en "One face, one race?"). This section will show the division of mankind into races proposed by various authors in the 700-800, which will have more deleterious effects in the first decades of the 1900s. Nowadays, thanks especially to human genetic studies, we can say that the division of Homo sapiens into races is just a cultural and social construction, without any sense in biology.

3.  "Una faccia, un destino?" (en "A face, a fate?"), in which the main topic will be physiognomy, analyzed from the artistic aspects of the XVI century till the pseudoscientific approach in the XIX century criminology in connection with phrenology, another famous pseudoscience, well-accepted in the same period.

4. "Con quella faccia un po' così" (quote from the popular Italian song "Genova per Noi" of the singer Paolo Conte), a session in which will be proposed different forensic facial reconstructions of historical personalities connected with the city of Padua.

5. "Ma che faccia fai?" (Italian popular expression). This part of the exhibition will be dedicated to human facial expressions.

6. "Dalla faccia alla maschera: il volto simbolico" (en "From the face to the mask: the symbolic aspect"). The final session will take advantage from the contribute of the Museo Internazionale della Maschera, Amleto e Donato Sartori and will show the symbolic aspect of the face: the mask.

The contribute of Arc-Team to the exhibition, in addition to the forensic facial reconstructions that will be created by our expert (+Cícero Moraes), will cover the touristic fruition of the event through scientific interactive installations mainly based on Computer Vision (from Augmented Reality to Facial Recognition and Motion Capture). In the presentation you can see some of the projected prototype, as well as some sources of inspiration (e.g. the movie "A scanner Darkly") some examples from the software we will use (e.g. Openframeworks). 

As you probably guessed from the title of this post, the main peculiarity of this event will be the fact that it can be considered an "open source exhibition", maybe the first of its kind, due to the fact that all the produced material will be released under the therms of the Creative Commons Attribution, which is a license approved for free cultural works. Moreover open techniques will be used also to collect material for the exhibition itself, with specific crowedsourcing campaigns, while part of the budget will be probably collected wit crowdfunding. I will have time to post more news about these last two topics, by now I just hope that you'll enjoy the presentation below (like always, to navigate just click on the image and use the spacebar to browse the slides).

For a better visualization, click here

Augmented Reality at Cultways

Yesterday Arc-Team attended the workshop "Cultural tourism and mobile technologies" organized by Trentino Sviluppo in the city of Rovereto. The meeting was related with the European project Cultways and, although we had not participated in the work (already concluded), we were invited to show some related research we did for other institutions (especially the Soprintendenza per i Beni Librari, Archivistici e Archeologici di Trento).

Here below is the poster we presented, done (like always) with Inkscape and GIMP:

The poster for the workshop

In addition to the poster, we prepared some Augmented Reality applications, to show the potentialities of this techniques in Cultural Heritage.
The first installation we did is a prototype for the upcoming exhibition that should take place in Padua in November 2014, as a collaboration between the Antrhropological Museum of the city, Antrocom Onlus, and Arc-Team. This event, called "Facce. I volti della storia umana", is the natural evolution of the Taung Project, and is ideally connected with the exhibition "Faces da Evolução" which took place in Curitiba (BZ). Both of the exhibitions are intended to be "open source", as the data, the software and the know-how has been (and will be) shared through the net.
Here is a short clip of the application, which is based on the joint used of Augmented Reality and 3D printed objects with RepRap (with the help of our friends of Kenstrapper):

The second installation we prepared is a prototype we developed for the Museum of Torre di Pordenone, in order to allow tourist fruition of part of the roman villa buried under the garden.

The third application regards a pilot project we are working on for the Archaeological Office of the Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano Alto Adige/ Autonome Provinz Bozen Suedtirol. The research is connected with a survey to map and document the WW1 evidences in the territory. As an experimental stage of the same project we are testing some Augmented Reality tools to develop cultural sightseeing of the landscape, looking to the commemoration of this event which will be in 2014/2015. Currently we are considering the possibility to print interactive maps like the prototype below:

Just an example of interactive map

Please notice that the informations displayed in the map are not geographically correct: they are just an example to show all the possible kind of data which can be loaded (images, movies, 3D models).

Another possibility for tourist fruition are interactive panels, like the one below...

A test for a panel

... in this case we just added a simple image, but, like the map before, we could load movies or 3D objects.

All the Augmented reality applications were done with Open Source and Free Software. I will describe these tools in the next post, but you can already find some information here in ATOR (just search for this topic).

The Taung Child is now touchable, thanks to 3d printing

As Luca Bezzi said in his presentation in Catania, the next step in the Taung project was 3d printing; in a previous post, I explained some issues we found in the original mesh. But thanks to Cicero's suggestions, the problems have been fixed, and 3 days ago Kentstrapper finally printed the Taung Child skull.

Here are some images:

The .stl model

Kentstrapper strongly believe that 3d printing can be a real revolution in education and culture. And, of course, in archaeology 3d printing should also be a great change in museum expositions: facial reconstructions, scale models of ancient buildings or (as in this case) plastic copies of finds could make archaeology much more easily understandable for visitors.

HERE you can download the final .stl file of the skull.

The Taung Project, an open research

This post is to share the presentation I did in Catania (Sicily), during the ArcheoFOSS 2013. The topic is the Taung Project, analyzed from a free and open source point of view. This experience, in fact, has been a perfect pilot project of "open research", developed with open tools and sharing at the same time knowledge and data.

I will not dwell any further on the topic of the presentation in this post, being this subject described in the video below...

... I will just report some technical data. 

 First of all (in alphabetic order), the authors of the presentation, which are not mentioned in the video (sorry, I forgot it...): Alessandro Bezzi (Arc-Team), Luca Bezzi (Arc-Team), Nicola Carrara (Anthropological Museum of Padua University), Cicero Moraes (Arc-Team/Blender Brazil), Moreno Tiziani (Antrocom Onlus).

Secondary, the software I used for the slides, which is the object of most of the questions I have been asked after the presentation :). Well, this program is called impress.js and it is released under the MIT and GPL licenses. Here you can see an example of what you can do with this tool and here is the source code.

That's all for now. I hope that the discussion about the concept of "open research" will go on with new contributes... Stay tuned :).

The Taung Project from a Free and Open Source point of view

The Taung Project has ended almost six months ago, but today I would like to analyze some of the most remarkable aspects of this experience, which can be considered as an example of open research.

This project, indeed, was able to meet all the three prerequisites that characterize an open research, achieving the primary goal of this blog (open archeology): the team used open tools (software and hardware), shared the necessary knowledge to replicate the experiment and published the data under open licenses. These three elements (open tools, open knowledge and open data) are the basis of the new idea of science that is emerging in recent years and that, hopefully, will also affect archeology as a discipline (and this is exactly the objective Arc-Team is pursuing since more than ten years). 
Tools, knowledge and data are like the rings of a chain (the research itself) whose potential increases significantly when a complete and free access is guaranteed.

The "Chain of Liberty"

If one of these ring is close (broken) or its access is restricted, the resulting weakness can affect the whole cognitive process, till the extreme consequence of invalidating the final result.
I would like to further analyze the benefits of an open approach to the archaeological research in ATOR, but, due to time reasons, today I will just report some of the old posts where it is possible to access the main steps of the Taung Project:

1) data acquisition
2) data processing

In those articles it is also possible to download the raw and processed data we produced, with the hope that they will be useful to new experiments and research ideas. For example, currently I'm using these data to test the Java-script application you ca see below (soon a post about it):

 PS

Writing this post I noticed that we never shared the data of this post, which marked the beginning of the experiments that led to the Taung project. It is now possible to download the 3D pointcloud here and the relative mesh here. Have fun!

Australopithecus afarensis - forensic facial reconstruction

The Australopithecus afarensis was an hominid that lived between 4 and 2 millions of years past.

They had biped behavior and the appearence of apes.

 

In this post I'll talk about my little adventure to reconstruct the face of this specie. 

This work is a type of continuation of Taung Project, because the knowledge used there was tapped here, with some increase of the technic.

I have to thank to Moacir Elias Santos, a Brazilian archaeologist that took a serie of pictures of a cast skull on Museu Egipcio e Rosacruz.

 The skull used was reconstructed with PPT GUI (scanning by picture).

 

 

To increase the quality of the reconstruction, I used a CT-Scan of a chimpanzee.

 

 

 The skull of chimp was deformed using Lattice modifier on Blender 3D, until match with the Australopithecus skull. Obviously, the skin was deformed too.

 

After this, I used the reference of the deformed skin to modeling the final face.

 

  The following steps were the same explained in other posts.

I hope you enjoyed.

A big hug!

ArcheOS 5 (Theodoric): testing Vokoscreen

One of the main problem in doing videotutorials for ArcheOS 4 (Caesar) regarded the possibility to record the desktop activities when using 3D applications. Here is my report about this topic in ArcheOS ML. As you can read, the software we chose (recordMyDesktop) was not able to record videos (just a series of screenshots) of windows displaying 3D objects (like other similar tools: Istanbul, Xvidcap, Shuter). 

Since I was using ArcheOS Caesar, I solved the problem with glc, before, and with ffmpeg, later (thanks to this post of Cicero Moraes). These two options have certainly high performance, but they are not user friendly for newbies. 

Now that we started again with the development of ArcheOS 5, I think we will need a simple tool to record video of 3D applications and maybe I found a good solution: Vokoscreen.

The video below shows a fast test I did with this software. The data comes from the Taung Project and were developed by Cicero Moraes.

With this new tool I hope that ArcheOS users will help us in doing videotutorials or simply in recording demonstrative videos of Theodoric in action.