The Trinity Library Long Room Mixed Reality Project, featuring Jonathan Swift

20th June 2018
The Trinity Library Long Room Mixed Reality Project, featuring Jonathan Swift

The Long Room holds a very special place in the hearts of students, staff, alumni of Trinity College Dublin, and the wider Dublin community. There is no substitute for the genuine experience of being immersed in the breath-taking space of the Long Room; however, we were inspired to create an anecdotal cross-reality (XR) narrative that would augment the visitor experience. The user is guided through the Long Room by a friendly 3D volumetric video (or vologram) representation of the famous Dean Jonathan Swift (played by actor Jonathan White). The innovative Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) prototypes that we created are based on volumetric video (VV) technology. They enable an interactive narrative whereby a visitor can either engage in VR tour of the Long Room or ‘augment’ their real visit by using an AR app that can run on a mobile phone/tablet or an AR head-mounted display. The project manifests a number of distinctive, important qulaities, including:

  • the museum content, like books, rare artefacts, sculptures, etc.;
  • the breath-taking environment of the building itself (a noted world heritage site);
  • the intangible cultural heritage, like the history and historical significance of Swift’s legacy at Trinity College;
  • the technology – completed in 2018, the project represents one of the first known uses of volumetirc video in a cultural heritage context;
  • and a scholarly synergy, in the sense that we formed an important interdisciplinary collaboration with the Library (the humanities) by developing the innovative technology around engaging content.

The interactive VR prototype visualises the Long Room building and its contents, allowing the user to be immersed in world of cultural heritage through VR simulation. The architectural simulation is built using a combination of manual 3D modelling and the computer vision process of photogrammetry, comprising a (static) 3D model that can be imported into a game engine and then combined with the (dynamic) VV content. A virtual visitor could potentially be located anywhere on the planet, and by putting on a head-mounted display (HMD), they can enter the magical, virtual simulation of the Long Room. The user can explore in this way on PC via various VR platforms like Firefox, Steam, the Oculus Store etc.

This video shows a screen-capture of the virtual reality version as experienced on the Valve Index HMD.

The AR version takes place within the physical space of the Long Room library, through the use of a HoloLens (HMD) or a handheld mobile device (like like a smartphone or tablet). It was developed in the second phase of the project and only uses dynamic VV content; that is, there is no need to ‘virtually’ reconstruct the internal spaces of the Long Room (the static content) because the user is already physically present in the space.

This video shows a screen-capture of a of the augmentd reality version as experienced using the Microsoft Hololens (1st gen) HMD.

The Trinity Long Room mixed reality project is an example of our creative experiments, which showcase our original technologies in real creative productions. By deploying it on both VR and AR, this production demonstrates the versatility of our volumetric video content, as well as demonstrating our novel tools and pipeline for innovative digital content creation.

Jonathan Swift: Augmented Reality Application for Trinity Library’s Long Room

In our first paper on the XR Jonathan Swift project, Jonathan Swift: Augmented Reality Application for Trinity Library’s Long Room, we describe the project’s use of cutting-edge free viewpoint video (FVV) techniques for developing content for our AR prototype. The article traces the evolutionary process from concept, through narrative development, to completed AR prototypes for the HoloLens and handheld tablet devices. It concludes with some reflections on the affordances of the various hardware formats and posits future directions for the research.

A Case Study on the Use of Volumetric Video in Augmented Reality for Cultural Heritage.

With interest in the use of AR currently growing alongside advances in visual display and 3D reconstruction technologies. With the integration of VV, AR can be enhanced with representations of live-action actors. In our paper A Case Study on the Use of Volumetric Video in Augmented Reality for Cultural Heritage, we present an exploratory case-study of our museologically focused AR application that evaluated the various parameters affecting the overall experience for visitors of the Long Room in the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin. Employing the volumetric 3D representation of Jonathan Swift, the benefits of applying VV in AR for a cultural heritage use-case scenario were explored. Moreover, we compared our two AR platforms for this prototype application: a tablet and an HMD. For this purpose, we collected post-task opinions of the application and processed quantitative and qualitative data. The results highlighted differences between the two platforms and showed how the developed VV AR application was initially received by the users.

You can check out our NordiCHI ’20 presentation below.

 

Volumetric Video in Augmented Reality Applications for Museological Narratives: A user study for the Long Room in the Library of Trinity College Dublin

XR technologies are quickly establishing themselves as commonplace platforms for presenting objects of historical, scientific, artistic, and cultural interest to the public. In this space, AR is notably successful in delivering cultural heritage (CH) applications, including architectural and environmental heritage reconstruction, exhibition data management and representation, storytelling, and exhibition curation. Generally, it has been observed that the nature of information delivery in applications created for narrating exhibitions tends to be informative and formal. In Volumetric Video in Augmented Reality Applications for Museological Narratives: A user study for the Long Room in the Library of Trinity College Dublin we report on the assessment of the pilot scene as a prototype AR application that attempts to break this mold by employing a humorous and playful mode of communication. Our bespoke AR experience harnesses the cutting-edge live-action capture technique of VV to create a digital tour-guide that playfully embellished the museological experience of the museum visitors. This applied research paper consists of measuring, presenting, and discussing the appeal, interest, and ease of use of this ludic AR storytelling strategy mediated via AR technology in a CH context.

Outputs:

O’Dwyer, N., Zerman, E., Young, G. W, Smolic, A., Dunne, S., and Shenton, H. (2021). Volumetric Video in Augmented Reality Applications for Museological Narratives: A user study for the Long Room in the Library of Trinity College Dublin. In: ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), Forthcoming.

Zerman, E., O’Dwyer, N., Young, G. W, and Smolic, A. (2020). A Case Study on the Use of Volumetric Video in Augmented Reality for Cultural Heritage. In: Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI ’20), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Tallinn, Estonia. https://doi.org/10.1145/3419249.3420115

O’Dwyer, N., Ondej, J., Pagés R., Amplianitis, K., and Smolic, A. (2018). Jonathan Swift: Augmented Reality Application for Trinity Library’s Long Room. In: Rouse R., Koenitz H., Haahr M. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11318. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04028-4_39

CategoryCreative Experiments