The purpose of this project was to combine the experience gained through “The British Empire Exhibition, Glasgow 1938” with the DigitalDesign Studio’s considerable expertise in digital documentation and an exceptionally unique real-time visualisation facility in order to enhance access to and engagement with the data gathered for the British EmpireExhibition project and provide an extensible toolkit for researchers to use with other 3D datasets. The project aimed to improve interpretation of theExhibition by linking, in a meaningful way, the related cultural artefacts on which the 3D model was based with the modelled data itself. In order to achieve this linkage between the 3D data and related information, we developed a tool which allows users to ‘annotate’ the data, and attach those annotations (or files) to points of space within the virtual model, as well as adding relationships between different attached objects (for example, adding notes to architectural features or linking all the photographs taken by a particular photographer). The database of annotations is export-compatible with CIDOC-CRM.

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The Enhancing Engagement with 3D Heritage Data through SemanticAnnotation project was graded by the AHRC as “An outstanding proposal meeting world-class standards of scholarship, originality, quality and significance”.It allows both researchers and the general public to virtually experience and collaboratively annotate environments which are inaccessible either because they no longer exist or because they are too far away or dangerous to access as well as increasing our understanding of the outstanding achievement of the historic 1938 British Empire Exhibition.

Downloads

A full .exe of this version of the 3D model and its associated archive can bedownloaded here.

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Related Publications

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Abbott, Daisy, Bale, Kim, Gowigati, Ramy, Pritchard, Douglasand Chapman, Paul (2011) Empire 3D: A Collaborative Semantic Annotation Toolfor Virtual Environments. Proceedings of The 2011 World Congress in ComputerScience, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing (WORLDCOMP'11: July 18-21,2011, USA). pp. 47-52. ISSN 1-60132-192-9

Bale, Kim, Abbott,Daisy, Gowigati, Ramy, Pritchard, Douglas and Chapman, Paul (2011) LinkingEvidence with Heritage Visualization using a large Scale CollaborativeInterface. Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Virtual Reality,Archaeology and Cultural Heritage VAST. pp. 121-128. ISSN 1811-864x

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