WebRTIViewer

Hi all,

I write this post to complete the one +Rupert Gietl did regarding Large Scale Reflectance Transformation Imaging. As you read in that article, Rupert, using +GRASS GIS, re-built virtually the necessary light conditions to process an RTI image of an entire archaeological area. 

This is just one of the test we are carrying on with RTI techniques, since we are trying to evaluate this methodology under different aspects. Obviously, during our experiments, we encounter interesting researches carried on by other institutions. 

This post regards one of the projects we found on our way (I will write soon about other related works) and, more precisely, a software to share RTI images through internet: WebRTIViewer. Actually the source code of the application, an HTML5-WebGL viewer, is release under the therms of the General Public License 3 (GPL 3) on the website of its author: +Gianpaolo Palma.

Here is an example of its application, using Rupert's data of the archaeological site (better visualized here). To see it, just turno on the light and, holding the left button, move your mouse around.

The software comes with two binary tools (one for Windows 32 bit and the other for Windows 64 bit), which are necessary to prepare the RTI images for the viewer. For this reason I wrote to Giampolo Palma to ask if there would be the possibility to insert WebRTIViewer and the other applications in ArcheOS (to do this we would need the access to the source code of the binary tools, called webGLRTIMaker) and he kindly answered that he likes the idea and he would agree, but before to release the code of the webGLRTIMaker under an open license he will ask the opinion of his labs colleagues (the Visual Computing Lab). This institute, part of the Italian CNR-ISTI, is the same that develops other nice Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) software, usefull in archaeology, such as MeshLab, which is often in our post, or 3DHOP (soon a post about it). Hopefully, if everything goes well, we will have another nice tool to add to the ArcheOS software selection, helping Cultural Heritage professionals in sharing data through RTI technologies.

Here below you can see again webRTIViewer in action (better visualized here), this time with data coming from the archaeological excavation of Khovle Gora (in Georgia), where we work for the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and support technically the fieldwork directed by Dr. Walter Kuntner of the Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altorientalistik.