ACM Multimedia 2010 – Shawbak
Full title: Natural Interaction for Cultural Heritage: the archaeological site of Shawbak
Abstract: One of the most interesting issues in the field of cultural heritage is the adoption of multimedia systems for the visualization and organization of information. In this paper we present a natural interaction based system designed to represent multimedia contents related to the archaeological site of Shawbak, situated in the Petra region of Jordan. Contents are composed of texts, images and videos showing and explaining the archeological site areas and the history of the castle. This system was installed at the Limonaia di Palazzo Pitti (Italy) for the archeological exhibition called "From Petra to Shawbak".
ERC Advanced Grant 2010 presented
I was recently involved in the presentation of an ERC Advanced Grant. The list of currently open calls are published by the European Research Council official website, here.
The project aims at realizing a wide and exhaustive study on the Mycenaean culture diffusion within the Eastern Mediterranean basin in the Late II Millennium B.C. with the support of a proper cross-medial research, in order to build up a user friendly macro DataBase of the whole archaeological evidences coming from the wide area of interest.
Principal investigator of the proposed grant is Anna Margherita Jasink. Her research activity addressed a variety of topics in continuous evolution with time, with a distinct interdisciplinary approach. In fact her field research has been concerned with both philological and historical themes connected to the Ancient Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean/Near Eastern civilisations.
The following investigators are the other members of the team:
- Prof. Stefania Mazzoni, professor of Archaeology ad Arts History of Near-Eastern civilisations in the University of Florence. With her expertise in Levantine world she will be in charge of coordinating the aspects concerning the presence of Mycenaeans in Syro-Palestinian area and in Anatolia;
- Prof. Gloria Rosati, Prof. of Egyptology in the University of Florence. With her expertise in Egyptian world she will be in charge of coordinating the aspects concerning the presence of Mycenaeans in Egypt;
- Prof. Giampaolo Graziadio, Prof. of Aegean civilisations in the University of Pisa. With his expertise in Mycenaean and Cypriote civilisations he will be in charge of coordinating the aspects concerning from one side the presence of Mycenaeans in Cyprus and from the other the role of Cyprus as an intermediary between Mycenaeans and the near-eastern countries;
- Dr. Luca Bombardieri, postdoc researcher in the University of Florence. With his expertise in field archaeology in Cyprus and Syria he will be in charge of coordinating the problematic question of the indirect contacts between the Mycenaean world and far away countries like Mesopotamia and Jordan.
- Eng. Thomas Alisi, postdoc consultant for the University of Florence. With his expertise in the field of interactive media environments and semantic web he will be in charge of the design of the overall software architecture, the definition of interaction models, coordination of the development team and delivery of project demonstrators.
The time frame has a schedule for delivering the first results in August, fingers crossed.
EVA 2009 – Natural Interaction
This paper presents the media interaction systems implemented at the Mont'Alfonso Fortress, close to Castelnuovo Garfagnana (Lucca). The stronghold was built at the end of the 16th century and after being abandoned for decades it was recently submitted to a complete restoration. A multimedia environment, made of large projections, was developed in one of the buildings inside the fortress. Users can interact with natural body gestures: the multimedia contents of two tables are driven by user's hands, while projections on walls and floor are activated by motion detection. All the sensing is made using near-IR cameras.



















