Introduction and Guest Welcome
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You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
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Hello everyone, welcome to the Architect Podcast, episode 14 for July 13th, 2015. I'm your host, Russ Eileen Willems, and today I'm joined by guest Josh Harle, a multidisciplinary researcher and new media artist who has a background in computer science, philosophy, and sculpture. One of Josh's projects with a pertinent to archaeology, although from his site, not the only one.
Exploring Site Viewer
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a program called Site Viewer that's an app that Josh built that allows archaeologists and other people out in the field or on mobile devices with not a lot of computer memory to display and share very high resolution photogrammetric and 3D models of archaeological sites and artifacts. Welcome to the show, Josh. Thank you, Ressa.
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Hey, this is Chris. I just wanted to jump in for a minute. Russell had a few microphone issues with this episode. He was recording it on Google Hangouts and I'm not sure if that was it, but we're fixing it. So sorry about that and let's get back to it and hopefully we'll have a fix next time. Still some good information in this episode though.
Josh Harle's Multidisciplinary Journey
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So Josh, could you tell our listeners a little bit about some of your background and how you got involved in computer science, philosophy, and sculpture? Those seem on the surface at least to be three very different fields. Yeah, it's a bit of a weird mix to come together. I'm pretty happy that they come together. So I started out originally
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Well, I guess before formal studies, I had a very mixed set of interests. But for whatever reason, I chose to do computer science first. I studied at Reading University. And Reading at the time, it's still actually doing pretty well with it. It had a very strong cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and computer vision department.
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So as part of the computer science, I was doing a lot of things with early computer vision algorithms, which sort of led on in this sort of direction.
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No, I finished the computer science degree into industry for a little bit. There were some fun projects to work on, but in general, I wasn't completely happy with sort of just sitting in an office working away on some little bit of utilitarian code and wanted to have a little bit more sort of broader education. So I came over to Australia. I'm half English, half Australian. My parents were
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emigrated over from Britain before I was born. I came over. This was my other possible sort of home place to see what it was like. I don't really like football very much, soccer. So I'm like, oh, well, maybe rugby is the thing that I own too. No, not so much.
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I don't fit completely into either of the two, but I came over and did a batch of arts, philosophy. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with that, but it was mind-blowing.
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Yeah, when I was, I think, you know, I was into computers before I did the computer science degree. I was programming like from a pretty early age. So the computer science degree, it wasn't very apart from the cybernetics and the computer vision stuff. I wasn't really learning very much. But the first semester of Bachelor of Arts, you know, I learned more in that first semester about sociology,
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psychology, philosophy, et cetera, et cetera, than I had in the whole computer science degree. So that was pretty exciting. And then went on to just expand it out a little bit more with the fine art. But I think they...
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I mean they're very different, but it's really nice to bring them together. Sometimes it feels like being a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, but it's sort of nice to bring ideas from one into the other, especially actually when it comes to sort of very contemporary uses of computer, like 3D reconstruction, 3D representation, where
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it's nice to have a bit of a critical view you know coming from the philosophy and the anthropology and sociology sort of side of things it's nice to be aware of some of the politics of the way of representing the world and capturing the world in that way so yeah I'm pretty happy with being able to bring it together and this is sort of one of those things where it's like
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trying to do a 3D reconstruction project, but also with a bit of a critical eye with the politics of archeology in Australia, especially.
Political and Social Implications in Archaeology
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Yeah, that's something that I really like kind of that combination you found of the different VIN diagrams, how they kind of overlap in the center there when it comes to things like heritage that, you know, has a material component, but also has a lot of philosophical component. There's that anthropology and archaeological theory of, well, how much do we really know about the past and how confident are we in our reconstructions and the political and social aspect of those reconstructions have meaning for living people, especially as you mentioned.
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here in the United States, there in Australia, and places around the world where there are living indigenous populations that we're looking at stuff that their ancestors built. And what we say about that as the degreed, you know, employed professionals, hopefully employed professionals, has a lot of impact. It can be brought up in court as evidence, and has. Sometimes to people's detriment, sometimes to people's benefit. Yeah, absolutely.
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So you mentioned that you studied kind of computers from an early age. Was that mostly on your own? Did you have that taught in classes in Britain and Australia?
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My dad comes from, he was a contractor and we were traveling around. He started out actually originally as a nuclear physicist and then went into computers because at that stage that sort of the entryway to computers was through these kind of exotic applied sort of sciences and then it's like the only people who had access to these big sort of mainframe machines were people doing some very
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unorthodox sort of like really esoteric types of projects. So I was, you know, making terrible, terrible games when I was like, absolutely, you know, like variations on like, guess what type of animal this is. And like, variations on maze, text based maze games and things like that, that were just, yeah, no, I mean, it was lucky that I was the only person that had to play them.
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But it got me interested in prior gaming and that sort of thing. I'm right there with you. I remember my brother had Atari 800, I think, that had the keyboard. And it had two tide boxes detergent boxes full of floppy disks that most of them were pirated games that he had gotten through SnickerNet or through Friends. But there was no basic Atari cart.
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that it would only work while the computer was running because after that the RAM would get wiped. I would check it out there and program it. You could sit there, you know, 20 go to 10 over and over again. Yes, exactly. Print I am cool. 20 go to 10. Absolutely, yeah.
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That's great, though. So it sounds like you came at it from a passionate view of, hey, I want to make this computer do something. I have access to this thing. Maybe not a lot of people do. And you kind of learn to bend it to your will slowly. And now you've gone on and gotten some of the education and theory behind it. And you're still doing that. You're making the computer work for you rather than the other way around.
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It's fun to be able to sort of be on the side of building to like, you know, you're not just sort of, it's, it's very easy if you're working on a set of tools from a purely like, you know, computer vision is like really pretty intensive maths and optimizing algorithms and things like that. And if you're sort of on that part,
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You kind of are so focused on solving those problems that you're not really in a position to sort of get out there and use the tools that you've made apart from in collaboration with other people. But it's kind of nice from where I am like I'm not I'm not a super advanced program or anything like I'm just just I suppose I take things
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take bunches of tools and bring them together is the main thing that I would say that I do. So I have something that I want to do and I am, you know, they say a lazy programmer is a good programmer. So like I go, I'm trying to accomplish this thing and I'm too lazy to try and do it myself. And I know that if I spend a little bit of time sort of putting the things together, then other people will be able to be as lazy as I am in the future, which is sort of that. That's great.
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No, go ahead. I guess I was going to say, I was going to ask maybe a later point now, because you raised an interesting point about maybe defining computer vision for some of our listeners. I think I know what it is, but I'm sure there's more in depth. But while we can, maybe talk more about that, that you aren't the ace PhD computer scientist programmer that is programming a low-level assembly and can completely make the computer do everything they want.
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But it sounds like you used, you know, as the lazy programmer or the smart programmer, you found ways maybe open source packages or third parties, stuff that's already been built that you can kind of customize and build up into something that you can use without having to reinvent the wheel.
00:09:42
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Yeah, low hanging fruit. And it's a shame that there's not more sort of I guess the jack of all trades are pretty useful for multidisciplinary across displaying research, because if you don't have any, you know, if you're not
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I would say with some of these approaches to doing things, you might have a problem and you have no idea whether it would take like 500 hours or like, you know, whether someone could bang out something in five minutes to accomplish it. So it's nice to have that sort of perspective to be able to see, well, this is actually something that will be very easy to speed up. You're doing something like,
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I was working with some, what do they call themselves, neuro, ooh, what is it, perceptual neurobiology researchers at UNSW. And they were doing a process that was like, I mean, they had a huge amount of expertise in a really particular
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processing methodology, which is like basically taking fMRI brain scans for like you have this animated model of what's going on in the brain over a certain amount of time. And then you do what's called the principal component analysis, which is taking this like problem and trying to go
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All right, how can we reduce, you know, this is many, many dimensions of this problem, which is basically like all of the neurons or the dimensions of your problem. And you go, oh, well, how can we try and look at this problem and reduce it down so we can explain it in the least number of dimensions as possible? So I think you have the most impact on that, that, you know, you can get close enough if you recreate just those main factors, the primary components, like you were saying.
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Yeah, absolutely. And I guess the analogy that I normally use is if you have like a motion in 3D space that's doing something, and then you go and it's like, you know, along three axes, it's sort of like doing a weird swirly sort of down the drain, the plug hole sort of thing. Just looking at the data,
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It's the data isn't very simple, but you can probably describe that. Okay. Here's this plane across these dimensions and here's this sort of motion. And then like, you can pretty much sum it up in a very simple way. If you have enough time, it says, yeah, we can get pretty close a best fit for that.
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So they were doing that on a single desktop computer overnight and they could do like one data set and if the data set didn't work then when they got there in the morning they'd have to maybe do it on the weekend if they needed to do more data than a single night's worth and that was like such a
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such a point where, you know, if you have a little bit of expertise, then you can throw that out into what I did basically was something to put it into the cloud so they could do like thousands in one go. But it doesn't take very long to do that. It's like, you know, a little bit of investment in time for building that toolset. And then it's just the complete the return is so much bigger than the amount of time it takes to work.
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So I suppose for me that that thing of being able to have the perspective of seeing and sometimes actually is the computer science part that sort of like obsessive let me trying to make a tool for that bit is completely not pragmatic at all and you spend longer making a tool to do this like this little task right then it would ever take you to just try and do the task.
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But at least there's that idea that if you put it out into the world, then other people will be able to benefit from it as well, which is nice. It's a nice feeling. The time that you're doing is contributing to other people's projects as well as your own, which is a nice feeling. You're kind of paying it forward because you've found open source projects that have saved your bacon in the past or made a really complex problem much, much simpler because they said, just, hey, you don't have to work out how to do this. You just put the data in on one side, it comes out the other side. And it comes out.
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Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I know probably in the show notes I'll find, I don't know if you ever read the webcomic XKCD, but there's one very much like that that's a graph of, you know, when is it worth it to make that tool? And it's like, yeah, if you're going to do it two or three times, it's probably not worth it. But if you're doing it four or five times, then the cost pays off exponentially. Yeah.
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Although I mean, like some some part of that, you know, it feels strange as well to be between these three different different disciplines, like the computer science philosophy, you know, or it's actually like poststructuralist philosophy as a sort of thing. So it's kind of, you know, sociology, philosophy, all these things that are together and then the art. And they kind of sometimes I describe it as having like a little seesaw in my the three three pronged seesaw in my my head.
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When you want a particular way of thinking like pulls you over to another and if I spent too long programming then I just become a very very weird person. But you know that mentality is like well actually you can spend a long time making a tool but part of that it's kind of like well you can go and
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You could watch TV, you could watch a film or something. It's kind of an entertaining thing to do to just sort of like problems or you can place a duco or something or you could make a tool that does it and get a little bit of enjoyment out of that process as well.
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If you're doing it right, it becomes sort of meditative and a little thing to zen out on. For me, I find as long as I stop at the right point, as long as I stop at the point where everything's working and don't count that right before bed or right before time to go eat lunch, because if I do, everything breaks and then I'm just pissy the rest of the night, the rest of the day, tossing and turning, thinking about, my code doesn't work.
00:15:33
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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I suppose the analogy is if you do your Sudoku and then you get to the last number and it doesn't add up and you're like, this is not a, um, this is not a satisfying experience at all. This is a problem that it was a solution. Yeah.
00:15:49
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00:16:22
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So Josh, real quickly if you could, I know it can be a complex topic, but computer vision, can you explain that to some of our listeners about what that is and what all entails and maybe what your interest is in that?
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Yeah, absolutely.
Understanding Computer Vision and Photogrammetry
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I mean, for this particular project, so your computer vision is like very, very broad, just sort of trying to get a computational understanding of what's out in the world. So that could be motioned, very basic motion detection will be using a webcam. So it looks at
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image after image as time goes on and very very basic motion action will just be going like a what's the difference between this frame and the next frame and then if there's enough difference between it then it will like highlight that area of the frame and say something is moving in that in that area. So that's one bit of like computer vision. Okay. The stuff that we're using for this 3D reconstruction is
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is a really nice, it's called photogrammetry, is the general term for sort of measuring and reconstructing from images. And they've been doing that for a very long time. They've been doing that with sort of reconnaissance images over war zones and things like that for a good long time. But this particular method that I'm using for building 3D models
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which is one that's being used a fair amount. A lot of people in archaeology and geology are using this method because it produces really great photo realistic, very easy to implement 3D reconstructions from photos. It takes a lot of photos, but when you've got enough overlap,
00:18:08
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You can get, you know, you basically run around a site, take enough photos, and you get a nice 3D model out of it. And one thing that's really nice, especially from the archaeological and geological sort of areas, people don't necessarily realize this, if that's your any exposure to these tool sets. It works fantastically for rocks.
00:18:35
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It's amazing. And then people, if you ever try and do it on a building or something with reflective surfaces or areas of uniform color or something, then it will probably completely die. But if you're any experience is working with rocks, with things that are non-reflective, with a lot of natural texture, then you're going to think stuff is magic, basically. Because it works so well on those data sets.
00:19:02
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It's amazing. I know a couple of our guests have talked about photo scan. Had you saw photo scan? Yeah. Photo scan is good. Absolutely. I've been really excited with people on the gaming side. I know there's one game, the vanishing of Ethan Carter, that they did primarily almost all their environments using photogrammetry and were able to have a small team create a large number of 3D models, very realistic ones, by using some of the same techniques that you're describing.
00:19:30
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Yeah, and that's kind of the sort of focus of this project. This project came out of a residency with the University of Western Australia. One part was the IVEC, the Advanced Visualization Lab, and the other part was the Center for Rockout Research and Management. And based, you know, I was coming
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to Western Australia with this sort of, you know, a bit of experience using things like AgiSoft during their precursors and or parallel projects that work slightly different. AgiSoft is fantastic because it just takes all of the, you don't have to think about any of the parameters, you just sort of hit the button and generally it's like it's sounded. But so they have these big 3D reconstructions but
00:20:22
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They're using it because they're like five million, six million. Actually, the model that I might have a chance to show you, I thought it was a five million poly model. It's actually a nine million poly model. So it's absolutely enormous.
00:20:38
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And if you have that size of reconstruction, there's only a couple of options for them for visualizing it. Either they bring people into their Advanced Visualization Lab and run it on these amazing machines. And that's another thing as well.
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There's a nice partnership between the Center for Rockout Research and Management and the Advanced Visualization Lab. So a lot of the archaeologists are coming in and using the machines in the Advanced Visualization Lab, but they don't have any idea of quite how amazingly powerful those machines are. So it's absolutely smooth as anything reconstructions of these nine million poly models. So if you bring people to your lab and show them, then it looks great.
00:21:26
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The other alternative is getting people to pre-render the video so you can put it online or show it off at a conference or something. If someone's holding a camcorder while in this environment or the computer equivalent of that, a fly-through or a fly-by.
00:21:43
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Yeah, exactly. Or I mean, like a lot of them were just sort of there to illustrate the 3D element. So it was just like a pan across or maybe like a slight shift of the of the thing. Yeah, along along the lines of that. So like completely baked into the into the video, the motion is completely baked in. You can't go anywhere else. It's not interactive.
00:22:05
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So my sort of contribution to that talking about computer games and computer games using photogrammetry was to look at again like I don't have a computer game development background at all other than having played a bunch of computer games and just you know I have some art games that I've been working on. Look at YouTube, you know do a little bit of research and
00:22:34
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What I did was take the techniques that you would use if you were designing a level in a computer game and applied those techniques to optimizing the mesh to these like absolutely enormous 3D reconstructions. So basically the tool sets that I've got that go along with Site Viewer are
00:22:57
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a set of tools that do the same thing that you would do if you were designing a computer game. So, the environments in a computer game look absolutely breathtaking, but underneath all of that is an enormous amount of experience and craft in how to optimize those to look great, but to have less polygons, basically.
00:23:22
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And that doesn't necessarily be used. And, you know, using things like, you know, almost like a movie set treating it as if we don't have to show it, if we don't have to render it, if nobody's going to be able to touch it or go there, we don't. Yeah, that's true. Well, unless it doesn't have to be as sort of theatrical to that, because the one thing that I've been repeating a bunch to in Western Australia was the idea that modern graphics hardware and computers
00:23:52
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is developed along with games developers. So they'll send the prototype card to the games developers. They'll be working on their new game, trying to push the envelope as much as possible. They're aiming for hardware that isn't commercially available until next year or two years when the game launches.
00:24:10
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Yeah, absolutely. They'll be working to this hardware level that's not in the wild yet, but they have constant conversations between the hardware developers and the game developers about
00:24:27
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what tech is used to get the most out of that hardware. So one thing that comes up when you're looking at these giant models is that if you just hit the button on Agisoft, it will make this model that's like a huge number of polygons. And all of the detail in that model is represented in polygons. Whereas in a computer game, what you have is a mesh, which is a lot
00:24:50
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Much more simple, but then the detail is still there. It's just the way that the detail is represented is in a very, very different way. So rather than having the detail actually sort of like in the raw polygons of the model, what you do is smooth out the model.
00:25:07
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So it's much more simple and then projects like a bump map and a normal map over the top of it. A bump map just sort of after the fact applies changes in height to the surface and the normal map applies the effects of
00:25:25
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the direction of that surface so like if light is coming from one side the normal map will say this part of the surface will be in shadow and this part of the surface will be in the in the broad the light so actually it doesn't have to be um doesn't have to be sneaky in the way that it reduces that that effect
00:25:44
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You can still have it look exactly the same. All that detail can still perceptually be there. So it's a little bit similar to like in geographic information software, where you might have a raster that is every single bit recorded across a surface, or you might have a vector which, you know, simplifies some of that, but you can end up getting the same result by interpolating between. Maybe you don't record everything between, but you say this elevation over here is this elevation over here. We have a line between them. Here's that grade between them.
00:26:12
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Yes, some of that is there. But again, you talked about bump mapping and normal mapping. Yeah.
00:26:20
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normal mapping and bump mapping. Some of it is interrelation, and it's not one thing that you can do that you can't do with the raw geometry is just conventional image compression stuff. So if you pull all of your detail out of your polygons, put it into an image, and then you can compress that image, then you can have the same effect compressing that detail. I mean, it pulls it into a very different
00:26:47
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problem area basically if you take it from the raw polygons and put it into an image, those different maps as they're called. And one thing that is really great about that is like modern graphics engines, graphics cards are designed to process those
00:27:06
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those maps in parallel. So they'll do like
3D Model Processing with Graphics Cards
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maybe, you know, a thousand polygons, sorry, a thousand pixels of that image in one, just in one go on their, like, this part of their parallel process. So if you split those out into different threads, as opposed to just saying it's all polygons, processed at all as polygons, the processor on the graphics card says, okay, I can handle that. I've got a defined pathway for polygons, bump mapping, normal mapping, and do them all at once.
00:27:34
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cool and also you know it's not um it doesn't have to be it's doing floating point uh sorry to get like super i don't know if this is super technical a little bit over my head but there's people that are interested and i absolutely am yeah right so it's a different it's doing a different type of processing as well you know super parallel um
00:27:55
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processing of the maps and it's doing as a floating point thing. So it's not, you know, the thing about graphics card is they absolutely screen through these processes and they do an awful lot of them at the same time, but there's no requirement for them to have exactly the same result for each pixel every time that it runs. So that's one of the ways that the graphics cards can be much, much faster than a conventional CPU is that they know that it's not a critical process. So, you know, if the color of your pixel
00:28:24
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is like one is out by by one value like one out of out of 255 of each color or something you know slightly slightly out for one frame of that image it's not going to be the end of the world so they can just blast through that sort of stuff and another good thing about that is like all these modern mobile devices
00:28:49
Speaker
And because they know people are going to want to sort of play around with 3D content, they've got their own accelerated 3D pipeline in them. So they'll do it slightly differently. But that's why you can put this content onto an iPad or mobile phone or whatever and have it run nice and smoothly because they're thinking about the same thing as with a desktop PC, for example. They're thinking about people using 3D content.
00:29:13
Speaker
So this is a great example of what you were talking about earlier, of rather than trying to reinvent the wheel for sharing geographic spaces, you know, archaeology or whatever, you took a look and said, hey, what's similar to this? Well, games, 3D games, are sharing environments that are mostly fictional, but nowadays more and more real. Games like Assassin's Creed are recreating Jerusalem and Venice and, you know, Rome and all these other cities.
00:29:39
Speaker
to a pretty high level of fidelity and although they've been gamified a little bit in terms of trying to find a critical path or putting game elements in there, architectural recreations are amazing and something that I always kind of wished, you know, instead of playing the game, sometimes you just turn all that off and walk around. What you found is that, you know, graphics hardware kind of evolved to meet that as they grew up in parallel. And now you've got a way to use that for, you know, what some people might term serious games or just 3D visualizations of archaeological sites. That's really cool.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's, you know, to see people, from their perspective, the UWA people, they didn't have to do it at all. It's just that, you know, they could have probably continued quite happily to you to build these enormous... Yeah, exactly.
00:30:29
Speaker
It's just like, for me, I didn't have the luxury of having any kind of equipment. So if I wanted to run, I have to sort of be a bit clever about it. And that's definitely, yeah, it's just, what do you do from a very different sort of...
00:30:45
Speaker
from a very different domain, the computer game domain. But you're trying to do the same thing effectively. You're trying to build a compelling 3D environment with as much detail as possible that will run as fast as possible. And actually, there's
00:31:00
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The idea that you have to lose detail when you're doing it, that it has to be crafty and reusing certain assets and things like that isn't true at all. You can get the same perceptual detail in there without losing anything, and it's much, much faster.
00:31:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. Well, we've talked about this quite a bit and I do want to talk some more. Like you said about some of the philosophy of how these things represented and then for some of the more technical side. What I like to do is leave our listeners with maybe some tools they can check out about if they're interested in getting into this side viewers. Obviously one tool they can use, but if they want to get into say using some of the game engines or other techniques that you've used.
00:31:41
Speaker
We'll talk about that in a minute. Could you go in and show Site Viewer? Do you have that ability to show us on the screen? Let me start it up. I've been talking about it for quite a while. Let's go. All right. And I'll go and check to see. We're actually recording this podcast live. And I sent out a couple advertisements. We'll see if anybody's actually on there and talking about it. I'll open up the Q&A for just a minute.
00:32:10
Speaker
And, uh, yeah, I'm just going to say.
00:32:20
Speaker
So here's site viewer, I just, I don't know if that was shared for everyone to see a moment ago. Yes, it's a bit weird to look at it. Okay, this is the terrible, terrible user interface, unfortunately. It's more of a... Well, I guess you argued. I think, yeah, most of the effort went into other bits. This is like completely utilitarian, this bit, but I will just open up
00:32:46
Speaker
a reconstruction that I've got already. And one nice thing about this, so it will download content from the internet and cache it so the next time that you try and connect to it, it will just load locally from the device.
00:33:02
Speaker
So you can load this stuff onto a tablet PC as long as you've got an internet connection when you're downloading it the first time through, then you're fine. And then once you've done it that first download process, you can take it wherever you want, basically. It can go anywhere. So this is a reason to update whenever change has been made to the model or there's a conversion on the server. You can update things through that.
00:33:32
Speaker
From this residency, I was going through sort of building all these tools, and then very late in the game, I realized that if people didn't have, you know, an Apple development license rating, then they weren't going to be able to actually easily share these. So the site view was kind of the cue of the project to realize that it would be also a very useful tool to have people being able to share their own arbitrary content.
00:33:59
Speaker
And they can share their arbitrary content without sharing it with the world at the moment because it's just a it's just a web address So if you want to share something privately between two people you can just you they can Download the app and then just share it however you want So I think it's it's quite powerful being able to allow people to just like put whatever they want and it's warm up there and
00:34:25
Speaker
Yeah, there's no barrier to having to spend time waiting for it to get approved on the app store or anything like that. You can just hang it out and see it.
00:34:36
Speaker
So at the height of the process is just taking a giant model and splitting it up into sections and then doing this optimization process on it. So each bit of this geometry is the low poly proxy. So it's reduced down the number of polygons and then re-projects over the texture map that makes it look like the right colors and everything.
00:35:02
Speaker
So if we look at just the wireframe, this might look completely different and not as nicely detailed, but with the bump mapping and the normal mapping on there, we're seeing what looks very much like the real site itself. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, it splits the problem up into sort of three different areas. And then the mesh, the wireframe of this would be like, it would look
00:35:32
Speaker
It's pretty simple. It's like an 80,000 ollie wireframe for this. Down from, you said nine million, the original model? Yeah. Wow. That's quite the order magnitude difference. Yeah, it's not too bad. I mean, like I, one, one sort of thing I should say about this reconstruction is it's taken from produced by about, I think 10, maybe 15 photos from this angle that I'm standing at at the moment. So you see, um,
00:36:00
Speaker
But when I go around the back, there's a big black hole. It just couldn't see it at the time. And I'm quite impressed with it. It managed to be a very good reconstruction from just a very few set of cameras. In the past, I've done photo shoots of sites that have been like 1,200 images or 2,000 images to get the detail. But this one didn't really need it.
00:36:38
Speaker
This is the Barre Peninsula in Pilbara, in Western Australia. And this one actually doesn't have, like very close to this, there are petroglyphs that we can look at. In this one I don't have, there aren't actually any petroglyphs, it's just more of a reconstruction of the sort of geographical features of this site.
00:36:53
Speaker
And what are we looking at here? What type of archaeological site are some of our viewers?
00:37:01
Speaker
kind of it looks like if I were out there this would look like a good test to see you know a lot of angles a lot of different colors if I were going to try to test the software maybe you get a chance to see how well it handled really irregular geometry I'm guessing
00:37:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the Bart Peninsula, because of the type of rocks there, is more challenging than other alternatives, instead of just cave-based rock art, I'd say, because there's so many overhangs and occlusions and things like that. This has worked out quite well, I'd say, apart from the fact that I didn't walk to this bit to take the pictures from this angle.
00:37:42
Speaker
Yeah, but you know it's generally looks like a big slope of scree, giant chunks of rocks. And that's kind of difficult from the photogrammetry perspective because you need to have
00:37:59
Speaker
uh, three overlapping images of any feature point that you want to get. So if there's sort of like a, yeah, it's, it gets, um, it gets more difficult to deal with that. So this is sort of a test of, of, uh, this, uh, these features and it's come out quite well. I can try and light another one, although I think
00:38:22
Speaker
Yeah, I, it will take a while to download, although maybe that will be good to show off the downloading process.
Offline Model Viewing and Optimization
00:38:29
Speaker
Yeah. So is it converting on the fly or whenever you upload this into site viewer, you've already done the processing to get it down to a much smaller, low poly version.
00:38:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. So at the moment, it's not converting on the fly. If you want to take your data set, your 3D model, and put it into a format that can be downloaded by site viewer, there's a tutorial, set of tutorials, actually, for exactly what you want to do. The nice thing about that, though, is that that process that's talked about in the tutorial
00:39:04
Speaker
It doesn't just apply to site viewer, it's sort of a nice thing to do anyway to optimize your model. So you go through this process. All sets that I've got are a script for, so the tools are actually on the tactical space website.
00:39:27
Speaker
And I'm pulling that up for our viewers right now, your profile page and then the Tactical Space Lab. And I love that you already have, as opposed to so many other archaeology software projects, you actually have tutorials and other kind of resources available for people. For instance, getting photo scan models on iPad, you have a four-part video on YouTube.
00:39:48
Speaker
and running on an Android phone. Just having that level of documentation, especially those videos, makes things a lot easier for myself, at least for someone who's trying to reuse a program. Yeah, well, even for me, if I'm coming back to a project that I haven't looked at, it's kind of nice to be able to watch my own tutorial videos to remember how exactly it's done. Right. That's the thing. You're writing comments to yourself six months later, as much as to anybody else. Yeah, exactly.
00:40:17
Speaker
So this video that you're showing at the moment, I was quite impressed that it runs on a mobile phone. I wasn't anticipating it being able to run on a mobile phone, but it's pretty nice to be able to go from something that takes a $30,000 computer to being able to run on a mobile phone.
00:40:36
Speaker
Yeah, to me, that's approaching magic, where, you know, the device in your pocket, you know, with the right cloud back in and processing. And this is great that it's loading up kind of the environment now. And we see the on-screen controls that, I'm assuming you can kind of manipulate these a little bit, unlike the videos, the static videos you were talking about. Yeah, I mean, it's modeled pretty much on a first-person shooter navigation control. One element of this form of visualization
00:41:05
Speaker
And also feeding into that idea of being informed by the process of building computer game levels is that I'm really interested, I guess more from the art perspective, at these reconstructions, not just being objects that you look at, but things where you can get more of a sense of space or the location that you're in.
00:41:35
Speaker
So the idea that rather than just doing these sort of untethered playthroughs of space, that you're actually walking through and sort of moving in that sort of first-person shooter perspective, where your eyes are at, your perspective is at eye height, you're having to sort of climb over things, so if I
00:41:55
Speaker
You know, I don't have that God's eye view that, you know, looking at down from an aerial image or a map, you know, gives you kind of a false impression of what could be seen from different places. Yeah, exactly. That's really neat. I'm just climbing on top of my bit of
00:42:16
Speaker
geometry. And if you get to a wall, you get stuck. It's like, if you kind of climb over it, then that's where you're going to stay. And Josh, it may not be showing us, um, your live feed right now. I'm still looking at a static view. Let me see. Did you see it at all? I might stop it and yeah, the screen share. And then you might have to pick a different window, especially if it's full screen. I know we're using Google Hangouts, which is great, but does have some, some hiccups here and there.
00:42:45
Speaker
Thank you. Let's try that. How about now? Black screen, but let's give it a second. Yes, I can see you moving around now. I'll move around very slowly to give it time to catch up. I'm just sort of showing off very much the model for how you move around these 3D reconstructions is based on a first person shooter.
00:43:15
Speaker
The perspective is a little sort of modeled player character. You can sort of climb over things as well, so you can move around the space. And if you hit a wall that you can't climb over, then you're stuck there. Otherwise, you can sort of walk around on the top of things. So this is actually applying these as if they were solid surfaces and giving them some physicality to them rather than just an image or a digital wireframe that you can just walk right through or zoom right through if you're not too careful.
First-Person Exploration in Site Viewer
00:43:44
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's much closer to a computer game environment than just a visualization. And I suppose one thing that would be nice to, you know, I was looking at taking ambient sound recordings from the sites and things like that and putting them into the environments. And for another project that I haven't implemented yet,
00:44:09
Speaker
I have a process of reconstructing people's motion. If they're walking through a site and sort of as a guide giving a tour of the site or just sort of a tour of the site, then another thing that came out of this residency that actually you can see if I restart this, you can see in the style image.
00:44:36
Speaker
So you can kind of add, I know some games, you know, there's an option in first-person shooters and other first-person adventure games to turn on and off like a head bob that kind of adds a little bit of motion as if you're taking steps or the ability to jump or climb.
00:44:50
Speaker
What this is in terms of reconstructing the motion, this is if you record someone giving you the space, then you can play back that person moving through the space. And you can sort of follow them. You can either see through their eyes. It's quite a nice thing. Or you can just follow them as a little sort of avatar through the space. So what this diagram, what this sort of intro screen shows, that blue line,
00:45:19
Speaker
sort of snaking along the bottom of that site is motion that's been reconstructed from a GoPro that someone has been wearing. So you strap a GoPro to someone's head, they walk through, they give it a tour, they point at things, move through the space, and then you can take the audio and the reconstructed motion of that tour and put it back into the reconstructed environment.
00:45:45
Speaker
play back their motion through the space. So not only could you give the, literally seeing through someone else's eyes if you're using this or if you're using like a camera enabled Google Glass or Oculus, but you could essentially have someone give a group of kids a tour, you know, school children a tour or like colleagues, you know, someone onsite walks through, maybe records their narration or does a condition assessment, thinking for cultural resource management.
00:46:11
Speaker
And then sends that packages it up, sends it off to their colleagues and says, Hey, you know, I know you're doing the right up. Here's my walkthrough as I'm chatting about, Oh, look, here's a little bit of damage here. We've seen some heavy rains. Maybe this is damaged, you know, the United States of Pueblo site or some of the things that's very interesting.
00:46:28
Speaker
I mean, I'd like to actually, talking of Rift, it's right on the edge of implementing the Rift for a site view. Because I'm building it in Unity 3D. It's very easy for us to throw in the Oculus Rift into Unity 3D. So, you know, right there. And that seems to be the focus on your Google Plus page. And that was going to be my next question, because that's something I've been working on, too, from the Google Cardboard end, because I can't afford an Oculus. Yeah. Yeah, the Cardboard's good. I love Unity.
00:46:57
Speaker
It's good enough for some purposes, but not quite there for others. I mean, it's certainly nice to be able to share it, for sure. But this is another thing where it's such a small little bit of effort to implement that. And then you go from being able to share your arbitrary 3D models to being able to share them with anyone, anywhere with a Oculus Rift.
00:47:23
Speaker
It's a very small amount of effort. I'm looking forward to implementing it. I think it's going to be the next couple of days actually that I'm going to be doing that. Okay. Please upload a video when you're comfortable, but I'd love to see that, especially if you can strap someone's grandmother into it. Someone who will react very well. All right. I'll do it.
00:47:44
Speaker
I'll take a quick break here and just think kind of our host podcast network, the Archaeology Podcast Network, and let people know that you can find not only the Archaeotech Podcast, but several other shows on archaeology, including some great new shows.
00:48:01
Speaker
such as the CRM Archaeology Podcast, which has been around for a while, and Archaeology Podcasts, Strangling Archaeologists Guide to Getting Dirty by Jenny McNiven, Profiles in CRM, which details different people working in CRM currently and how their experience being an archaeologist has been. And especially interesting, so a wider audience is Excavating Sex with Sarah Head and Ashley Morton. You can find these and other shows on archaeologypodcastnetwork.com or on iTunes or Stitcher Radio.
00:48:35
Speaker
Great. I have a demo actually from a slightly different project. It was a precursor to this rock art stuff that will give an idea of what I'm in from the tours a little bit more.
Immersive Digital Spaces: Balance and Presence
00:48:51
Speaker
If you are happy to have me do it, let me see if I can. Absolutely. Matter of fact,
00:48:56
Speaker
while you're doing that all set up. Do you mind if I show off your GitHub portfolio? No, not at all. It's very diverse. It's a bit eclectic, my GitHub portfolio. But yeah, by all means. Well, I'd love to hear just kind of, you know, as someone that has an interest in archaeology, but it's not necessarily an archaeologist themselves, you know, all the different things that you're working on, I think that's something myself and other archaeologists can learn is that there's people out there that have the skills and have the interest
00:49:24
Speaker
and maybe just, you know, archaeology is one place where they can apply those. So for some of our listeners that may not be familiar, GitHub is kind of the Facebook of social code sharing, and it's a way to track different versions of your software using a program, a version control software just called Git that's free to use. And here you can see Joshua Harle's profile at neon nascent.
00:49:51
Speaker
and he's got Site Viewer, Nugget Master, 3D Sound Tracking, all sorts of really cool things, including one on board game design. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, the stuff right at the top is very funny. There's more useful bits and pieces and tools instead of forks of slight modifications of other tools to do things. The Nugget Master is actually Arduino programming for making a robot arm eat a chicken McNugget.
00:50:20
Speaker
In terms of the diversity of things on the GitHub, it's pretty funny. So while I show off kind of the Android market and iTunes market store pages, you got to tell me the story about the Chicken McNugget eating robot. How did that come about?
00:50:36
Speaker
I mean, I'm a new meteorologist as well as just sort of a general researcher and I developed that sort of as a project for trying to make a robot do the most sort of weird and unlikely thing that I could think up. And that was it.
00:50:55
Speaker
So it's actually, it's quite an involved process and actually part of the digestive process of this nugget eating the chicken, the robot eating the chicken nugget is an automated food processor stage that's kind of explosive in its digestive figure, let's say. So it's pretty fun to watch.
00:51:14
Speaker
OK. Do you have a YouTube video of that process? There is. Yeah, there's definitely. That's my subscription.
00:51:26
Speaker
Let me find out. Here we go. All right. So this is a tunnel reconstruction that I did. This is the one that was, there's 1,200 images. It's a 35-meter-long tunnel. And this was sort of before I got the access to go to Western Australia and visit some of these remote sites. This is pretty much my proxy for that because it's
00:51:53
Speaker
Other than rock art, graffiti in terms of computer vision is a very similar subject. It's non-reflective generally. It's got a lot of very computer vision interesting features that allow it to 3D reconstruct really well.
00:52:10
Speaker
And this was, I was thinking that this sort of thing was the closest thing to kind of a cave reconstruction that I could do just five minutes from where I lived. So it was, you know, this is another sort of thing. But one thing that's built in, so the detail is pretty good for this. And I was also sort of trying to push the envelope in terms of what detail I could get.
00:52:32
Speaker
exploring this process of optimizing the meshes and being able to get it to run pretty smoothly. But another thing that I experimented with from here is
00:52:46
Speaker
tours. This is another case of a terrible, terrible user interface design decision. The avatar that's running through doing the tours is very weird. Sort of my idea of kind of a neutral thing. Oh well, but this is actually the model acting as a tour guide for the viewer.
00:53:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, wow. Um, so he's got, I'm going to have to turn it off because he's talking quite loudly in my ears. I'm not sure if anyone else can hear it. Um, but he's got a little torch attached to his, to his hand. So when he points at things, uh, it lights up the thing that he's pointing at and sort of, you know, he can, he can run around and point at things and give a sort of bit of an annotated or a guided
00:53:35
Speaker
tour of the site. Yeah, that's something I've noticed. Again, going back to computer games, especially ones done by the publisher Valve and developer Valve, including commentary as little nodes or audio pieces as you're walking around in the environment.
00:53:51
Speaker
you get some context or a bit of story or a bit of you know how it was made but here obviously you could get all sorts of things like interpretations by this archaeologist or by this indigenous person or by in this case an artist a tagger that was there or has some of their stuff in there maybe talks a little bit about the culture of tagging and why they're up absolutely
00:54:12
Speaker
I mean the focus is all sort of trying to push the incredibly powerful 3D reconstruction technology, trying to push it back into something where it's not just the site as an object, it's something where you start to feel
00:54:30
Speaker
a sense of what it's like, basically, a sense of it as a location that you can inhabit in one form or another. Especially, you know, as a digital heritage or digital conservations for the project, some of these places might not be around in there. This, I mean, the tunnel itself, it's probably less catastrophic that it doesn't exist in its form at the moment.
00:54:57
Speaker
But then I watched it two weeks after I did this set of photography. And I had no idea. It's about seven or eight years of graffiti on it. Two weeks after they whitewashed it. So it was a little bit sweet. It was great that I was there.
00:55:14
Speaker
I remember being in college and walking by this kind of highway and there was a little park next to it that had these soundproof walls but there was kind of a war going on or at least a dialogue between the police and the taggers that you know I think I got whitewashed once and the next week when I walked my dog past it it just exploded you know there was tons of art everywhere on it really beautiful pieces in some cases yeah and then painted over again
00:55:40
Speaker
And it went back and forth for at least a week or two that there was both sides. But you're right. I mean, this is the case with a lot of antiquities that have been stolen or lost or as in the case of Syria and other places, just massive looting or ISIL or other groups actually going in and potentially destroying those places of cultural heritage. Sometimes that's all you have left is the photographs or the digital recording.
00:56:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's a bit scary for sure. And it's, I mean, this is potentially some of the politics of this process as well is that there's, you know, in Western Australia, there's a lot of mining going on. So the this, you know, the some of these sites are still very fragile and actually are
00:56:26
Speaker
The Bharat Peninsula, for example, there's a major mining corporation is operating within the Bharat Peninsula and these sites are under threat, a very real threat to their continuation. So I guess sort of I'm feeling that it's important to make them
00:56:48
Speaker
I'm very ambivalent towards the term capture, because I think the term capture has all this, yep. But at least sort of trying to evoke the sense of these sites as they are to be within them, rather than just like here is sort of a, here is a bit of a rock art as an object that we're going to look at and sort of analyze rather than,
00:57:12
Speaker
here is a site that we can sort of go in and get some sort of a feel of being within. And that again is just coming from playing a lot of computer games, seeing how a lot of mapping and scanning technology
00:57:29
Speaker
Its job is to make things more legical and pull the information out, things like Google Maps where you have a very abstract representation of the world according to certain design decisions.
00:57:44
Speaker
Within my research, I was looking at that in comparison to computer games, where you have these incredibly believable, emotionally compelling, these sites that really make you feel like they're real and really make you feel like you're inhabiting them. But they're fictional spaces. They're entirely fictional spaces.
00:58:08
Speaker
interesting for me to look at the contrast between like representations of real spaces which are completely abstract from the sense of being there and then 3D reconstructed spaces in computer games which are entirely fictional but actually like really believable spaces inhabited by like pretty believable characters and you actually have like a really strong sense of atmosphere in them.
00:58:32
Speaker
Well, I like that you took that lesson from computer games. You were talking earlier about wanting to include the soundscape of what it sounds like at that place. Is it quiet? Is there traffic nearby? We've spoken earlier on our podcast with Stu Eve, who's with Heritage Management in the UK. And he wants to do even smells of, if you walk up to a harsh site and that would have been a cooking fire, pretty historically, he smells some roasting meat.
00:58:58
Speaker
There's these contexts and things that we don't think about. Was it a spelling area? We dig a lot of latrines in archaeology. It's supposed to be great. Maybe that's when you want to flick that button off. But thinking about them in a larger context, if we're doing our jobs right, that's always what we're trying to think about.
00:59:14
Speaker
landscapes as opposed to necessarily sites or how this can be viewed or you know is this some place you want to be at midday you know in June or July or in Australia I guess in December or January or is it going to be too hot you know what types of things make sense and capture might not capture but document as much of that as you can for that reconstruction that's never going to be getting to the post-structural it's never going to be perfectly communicated but you can approach it you know it's an asymptotic thing yeah absolutely
00:59:43
Speaker
Well, we only have a few minutes left, Josh.
Emotional Engagement in Digital Spaces
00:59:46
Speaker
One follow-up question that I'll ask you, and then I'll leave it open to you if you have any other projects you'd like to talk about or any things that you'd like to have people know. You mentioned real places in games or places that you felt a really emotional connection to. Maybe for our listeners, just list some of those examples of when you think about doing archaeology reconstructures or reconstructing environments.
01:00:06
Speaker
never actually been there. This place doesn't exist. But man, I've got memories of hiking up this slope or battling things in this valley.
01:00:15
Speaker
Yeah, I can actually for there's a there's a set of conferences in in western in Paris in October. One of them is the National Forum for Experimental Art, or actually National Experimental Art Forum. And it is where I'm doing a safari of these digital spaces. So the workshop is called inhabiting digital spaces. And I'm just going through
01:00:40
Speaker
The iVec lab has got this fantastic wall-sized, you know, 6K by 6K 3D screen. So the idea is to stand people in front of that and just like load up these locations and do a little bit of a safari through these spaces and go like this is why it works, this is why it's compelling, this is what's going on. So I would say one obvious location is in a game called Dear Esther, which is sort of a
01:01:07
Speaker
non-linear storytelling game that's based on a Hebridean island. It's absolutely breathtaking, just incredibly beautiful.
01:01:15
Speaker
Incredibly, incredibly beautiful. You know, GTA is really good looking at a very different way of representing space. So I suppose I look at three different ways to look at representing space or sort of evoking locations. One of them is post-apocalyptic environments where it's actually what you're doing is very much that sort of archaeology.
01:01:38
Speaker
You're walking through these destroyed post-apocalyptic environments and trying to piece together the environment before the fall and the lives that were there before. There's stories embedded in that. That's interesting.
01:01:53
Speaker
So some of it is like you can just see from from what's happened to the landscape and then like they do tend to do quite a heavy-handed Storytelling thing where you find people's very conveniently find people's diaries and things like that amongst everything
01:02:10
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. But that's a very haunting experience where you're going through and you're piecing it together yourself. You're creating your own ghosts in that environment because there's no actual inhabitants in it.
01:02:29
Speaker
And it's convenient for the game developers as well because it's very difficult to do compelling artificial intelligence characters. It's really difficult to have people there and talk to them and for it to feel like a really convincing engagement. But if you just leave the people out and put the signs of them having been there, then you do it all in your, I mean, you like, you create it yourself. Yeah, exactly.
01:02:55
Speaker
It works really well absolutely and then of course there's things like GTA where they're creating the sense of the city like I think it's GTA 4 where it's in this sort of caricature of New York and if you've been to parts of New York
01:03:11
Speaker
that there's districts would have been sort of reduced down to a single block but you can you can tell where they are you can they have that flavor of well this is Chinatown or this is you know the Bronx like yeah yeah exactly cool things and sounds that you hear I just wish GTA didn't
01:03:31
Speaker
You know, I guess what's the term? Take the piss so much? Yeah. Such a great job. And they're approaching such a high level of fidelity that there's a bigger disconnect between how beautiful things are and then the dick and poop jokes on the other end. Yeah, for me at least. Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of craft in it and then it's sort of like a whole lot of things. But I mean, you were saying before.
01:03:54
Speaker
Yeah, potentially. You were saying before about being in these environments and just wanting to not play the storyline and just walking around, but that's something that I do quite a lot, just spending a long time just looking at the environment since we're getting a feel for the location rather than sort of running away and robbing a bank or anything.
01:04:15
Speaker
is pretty interesting. There's Far Cry 2 was an incredible game that pretty much did the same thing as GTA but in a different environment. They took the whole of the African continent and sort of compressed it down.
01:04:31
Speaker
with you know procedural animals and procedural weather so there's points in that game where you're running from one place to another and you just have to stop to look at a beautiful sunset over a particular type of landscape in one you know specific to one part of the African continent it might be like a
01:04:51
Speaker
you know tundra or it might be a desert in one part or it might be a jungle or whatever and you're watching the sun set over a beautiful absolutely beautiful view and there's like an animal standing there sort of herding around and things that's just incredible it's really incredible
01:05:10
Speaker
So that's a good one as well. I might, after this, give you a list. That would be fantastic. I would love it if, you know, this is something I always try to get people to shoot for at conferences, if there's any way to get audio or video, you know, even later if it's not live, but that's something I would really enjoy seeing. And I know at least one of the archaeologists, Andrew Reinhardt, that's looking at archaeology in games, things like World of Warcraft or Fable or Elder Scrolls, that would be right up
01:05:40
Speaker
as well. I think that's just about all the time that we have on the show today. Josh, if people want to connect with you or see more of your work, where are the places to do that or follow you online on social media if you have accounts?
Follow Josh Harle's Work
01:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, so probably the best place for the sort of research work that I do is tacticalspace.org. And that's connected to just my art profile, which is joshhile.com. Tactical space tends to get sort of blog updates for more regular updates for things. And then the projects just go onto that as project pages. That's probably best. Yeah, I'll keep that updated.
01:06:26
Speaker
Otherwise, every so often, I'll put something on YouTube or Vimeo. So if you follow on the YouTube or Vimeo channels, then there'll be fairly regular updates. It's tech updates and things like that that should be with us. Yeah, I would just subscribe to your YouTube channel. And even though you were at 42, and I appreciate the Douglas Adams reference, I think we need to raise it a little bit higher because you've got some fantastic content on there. Thank you. Yeah, I'll be happy for that.
01:06:53
Speaker
Alright Josh, thanks for joining me again. To our listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of the Architect Podcast. Don't forget to vote for us on iTunes and listen to us on Stitcher Radio. And please leave us reviews if you like the show, if you don't like the show, if you're an archaeologist out there, or new media artist, or you know, anybody that has a connection to digital and archaeology. Please give us a ring, drop us a line if you'd like to be on the show or suggest a topic. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again. Cheers.
01:07:28
Speaker
That's it for another episode of the archaeotech podcast. Links to some of the items mentioned on the show are in the show notes for this podcast, which can be found at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash archaeotech. If you like the show and want to comment, please do. You can leave comments about this or any other episode on the website or on the iTunes page for this episode.
01:07:48
Speaker
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01:08:14
Speaker
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01:08:33
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:08:51
Speaker
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