Actual Reality Beckons at Conference on Future of Virtual Reality
- Tiffany Fox
- Oct 22, 2015
- 2 min read
About a week before researchers gathered at the University of California, San Diego for a conference on the “Future of Virtual Reality,” actual reality was unfolding, albeit tragically, in the Syrian City of Palmyra. The ancient and historically significant Temple of Bel had been demolished by members of the ISIS military group. No one would ever set foot in the Temple of Bel again.
Or would they?
With the right images and photogrammetry techniques, the Temple could one day be recreated as it looked before it was destroyed – not in marble or stone, but in virtual reality. It’s an idea that’s been explored for nearly a decade at the UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute, one of the world’s foremost centers for digital archaeology, a long-time investor in virtual reality research and the meeting ground for the two-day conference.
Jürgen Schulze
With world heritage sites increasingly threatened by global conflict and climate change, so-called “rescue archaeology” – the creation of 3D virtual models of important sites – is a growing field. An example is Project Mosul, created by UC San Diego alumnus and QI affiliate Matthew Vincent and one of the many virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) projects discussed at the Future of VR, which was organized by QI virtual reality research scientist Jürgen Schulze and funded through a grant from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology’s Strategic Research Opportunities program (QI is the UC San Diego division of Calit2). Project Mosul uses digital photographs crowd-sourced from people around the world – including U.S. soldiers – to create 3D virtual models of cultural heritage sites destroyed in Mosul, Iraq. When the photos are “stitched” together into a stereoscopic model and then viewed with 3D glasses, the effect is photo-realistic and so convincing, some say, “it’s like being there.”
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http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/actual_reality_beckons_at_conference_on_future_of_virtual_reality
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