GRAPHITE 2007 : Special Sessions

Rama Contraptions: Panoramic Imaging and 360-degree Display Systems for Cultural Heritage Visualization

Sarah Kenderdine
Head of Special Projects, Museum Victoria, Australia

The panorama reveals itself as a navigable space, persistent throughout media history. The re-emergence of the panoramic scheme as the new image vogue, underscores it as a highly persuasive interface. This session introduces the experiments that rework the immersive architecture of the panorama, with interactive language of new digital interfaces as modalities of the exploded, expanded, and virtualized cinematic. The session will highlight several large scale immersive, stereographic display systems and panoramic capture technologies from Museum Victoria and iCinema Centre, UNSW used for the development of high resolution interactive digital cultural heritage applications.

Several of these technologies will be examined in more detail through the research associated with applications from the Place-Hampi project. Place-Hampi is an embodied theatre of participation in the drama of Hindu mythology focused at the most significant archaeological, historical and sacred locations of the World Heritage site Vijayanagara (Hampi), South India. Through the PLACE platform and the Advanced Visualization Interactive Environment a translation of spatial potential is enacted in Place-Hampi where participants are able to transform myths into the drama of a co-evolutionary narrative by their actions within the virtual landscape and through the creation of a virtual heritage embodiment of a real world dynamic. Place-Hampi restores symmetry to the autonomy of interactions within virtual heritage and allows machine and human entities to make narrative sense of each other’s actions (as an entanglement of people-things cf Bruno Latour).