Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
LithodomosVR and a Virtual Reality Update - Ep 108
191 Plays6 years ago
Virtual Reality has continued to capture imaginations and make people want to be places virtually since the expense of going can be high. We talked to Simon Young of LithodomosVR about their virtual archaeological tours back in January of 2017 and he's back now to give us an update on what they're doing.
LinksEpisode 45 with LithodomosVRLithodomos VRLithodomos VR AppsThe Shop Page on the WebsiteSearch your devices app store for all Lithodomos VR AppsCheck out the Exlore App and use this code to activate (note: will only work for EVERYONE for a short time)Code: 7OJpdbkqIApple DownloadGoogle DownloadPDF on Using ExploreApp of the DayWebby: VR Tunnel Race, Apple, GooglePaul: Castle Wreck, Apple, GoogleContactChris WebsterTwitter: @archeowebbyEmail: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.comPaul ZimmermanTwitter: @lugalEmail: paul@lugal.com
Recommended
Transcript
Show Sponsorship and Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 108. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk to Simon Young of Lithodomos VR. Let's get to it. All right, welcome back to the Archaeotech Podcast.
Personal News and Guest Introduction
00:00:36
Speaker
Paul, how's it going? It's going pretty good today. How you doing, Chris? Not too bad, not too bad. Heating up over here in Reno.
00:00:42
Speaker
mid June as we're recording this mid June of 2019. Yeah. Mid June. I've got some news. I've got good news. I've got sad news. Which do you want first? Uh, good news. The good news. The good news is that we're recording in the middle of June and it was my birthday yesterday and it was a big one, a milestone. So if anybody out there feels like, you know, nominating me, uh, I'm now old enough to be in the national registry of historic places. Fantastic.
00:01:09
Speaker
Is that the sad news as well? No, the sad news is on my birthday, I also found out about the passing of an old friend of mine, Joe Waseel. He was a professor at MICA and he was the co-director of the Petra Grey Temple expedition, excavations that I was on in the 90s and early 2000s. And, you know, so it's really sad to hear of his passing.
00:01:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's no good. Well, on to happier things then for everybody all around. So back on episode 45 recorded January or at least posted January 26, 2017, we recorded with Simon, who's going to come on here in a second from Lithodomos. Simon Young holds a PhD in classical archaeology and is passionate about the ancient world.
00:01:54
Speaker
He is a renowned global leader in VR archaeology and commercializing digital humanities. Simon is a brilliant storyteller and is focused on bringing the customer's vision and the ancient world to life. Welcome to the show, Simon. Hey, guys. Thanks. It's great to be back. Awesome. Awesome. And just to let our listeners know, there might be some audio challenges. Simon's in Australia, Paul's in Manhattan and New York, and I'm in Reno, Nevada. So we're encountering some internet fluctuations. We're dealing with it.
00:02:22
Speaker
Paul, I'm going to be in Manhattan next week, actually. In fact, that's probably a good place to start.
Launching a New App
00:02:29
Speaker
We're heading out to the American Classical League annual conference where we are launching our new app, which contains our entire content library of 490 viewpoints of the ancient world. So that's pretty exciting.
00:02:46
Speaker
All right. Well, I definitely want to talk about that because you sent over a link to that app that, uh, that I was able to check out for a little bit. And I don't think I got through all 490, uh, points of contact. However, I did see a lot of things. And so what, let's, let's start back at the beginning here for those that, that didn't hear the first episode of this. What is Lithodomos VR? How did you guys start and what is the platform?
Origins and Growth of Lithodomos VR
00:03:10
Speaker
When I was doing my PhD, just finishing it up in 2016, and my PhD was about ancient Greek and Roman cityscapes in Asia Minor, looking at six examples, I was looking into how ancient observers experienced a changing cityscape over time.
00:03:30
Speaker
So I was really keen to try and understand almost like a viewshed analysis of what ancient cities look like from a human street level. So I started playing around with 3D modeling software and visualization software like AutoCAD and SketchUp and
00:03:48
Speaker
and the like and finally hit upon this great free for everyone software package called Blender. So I downloaded Blender and gave it a go and it was a bit dismayed at first because it was kind of like had so many controls it was like trying to learn how to fly a plane.
00:04:06
Speaker
But I persevered and got my first models out and was very excited by the results. I don't think they were very good, but I was very excited. Coincidentally, at the same time, there was a resurgence in virtual reality technology.
00:04:24
Speaker
Oculus had just launched its development kit and hit upon the idea that the 3D models I created in Blender, I could potentially visualize in this Oculus Rift dev kit. So I got hold of one, put in one of my models and put on the headset and hey presto, there I was standing in my model. And I went, wow, this is pretty amazing. This is much better than a printout.
00:04:53
Speaker
I'm actually not on the embossed street in Ephesus. So I was pretty excited about it and got a little obsessed about putting in more models and making more virtuality environments. And then I started showing people and they got pretty excited as well.
00:05:10
Speaker
So at a bachelor party in 2016, I bumped into a tech incubator type and told him about the idea. And he got excited about it as well. He decided to incubate the idea with me. We came up with a commercial product.
00:05:30
Speaker
And in 2017, when we spoke in January, we secured a $1 million investment in the idea. So for a PhD, struggling PhD student who
00:05:42
Speaker
who had been living off two-minute noodles for the last four years to suddenly see that amount of money in any bank account was quite mind-blowing. Of course it wasn't. It's the company's investment. So that was very exciting. Things took off from there. We spent 2017 developing the product
00:06:05
Speaker
traveling to Europe, meeting up with tour guides, universities and museums, testing out what worked, what didn't in terms of a commercial product.
VR in Archaeological Parks
00:06:15
Speaker
But basically the idea was that you take this mobile VR headset and you stand in an archaeological park or site and you put the headset on and you see what was there. But in terms of an archaeologically correct reconstruction.
00:06:35
Speaker
So that's basically how it all started. Well, I'd like to think that it's interesting to me that you got a million dollars in investment right after you came on the Archaeotech podcast last time. So I think you've probably got $5 million coming in July. That's going to be my guess. Right. It's a direct correlation.
00:07:00
Speaker
Absolutely. That's what we do for everybody. We just can't get millions of dollars ourselves, but we give it to everyone else. Yeah. So what's changed in the last couple of years? I mean, you alluded to it a little bit, but I know the full scale platform is a little bit different than what I remember seeing from Lithodomos when we were first checking you guys out because you had
00:07:25
Speaker
several different apps available in the App Store based on location, right?
Business Model and Collaborations
00:07:30
Speaker
And then you download those particular applications and you walk around and see there. So what's changed? Has there been a refocusing at all? Or are you just adding to what you have? What's different? Yeah, it's been a really interesting journey in the sense that when we started out, all we really knew was that archaeology in VR is really cool and people love it.
00:07:54
Speaker
But how do you actually transform that into a product or a business, something that people will pay for, something that will create a self-sustaining economic model? And that's been the challenge over the last two years to work out
00:08:13
Speaker
how we deploy this content to everybody and how it becomes a viable business. So what's emerged from this last couple of years of, I guess it's research and development, testing different products and apps, which is why you'll see a lot of different apps on the App Store.
00:08:32
Speaker
is that Podomos has emerged as, I like to call it, a tale of two businesses. It's both a content creation studio where museums or archaeological excavations or universities fund archaeologically correct 3D reconstructions of spaces. So that's one side of it, the content creation studio.
00:08:58
Speaker
And the second side of it is almost a software as a service business where the content that's been created ends up on a content library that's hosted in the cloud that educators or museums or tourists or visitors to Asian sites can access by paying a small fee to unlock the library. And that's what Explore is.
00:09:25
Speaker
It's both a content creation studio and a software as a service or a cloud content access platform, if that makes sense. Do you imagine this content being sold directly to the end consumers? Do you imagine it being sold to intermediaries of museums or antiquities authorities and alike?
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So one of our first clients was the University of Sydney, who were just interested in a straight content creation deal. We recreated the Roman theater at Nea Papos on Cyprus. Another university, again, it was a straight content creation deal and an app in Cordoba, where we created the different phases of a castle in a place called Bel Mess.
00:10:16
Speaker
from the Neolithic to the medieval period. Other content we've created off our own bat, for example, the Colosseum, Exterior, Interior and Underground, just because there were so many tourism operators who were keen on using it to help add value to their tours and to be able to show people what it used to look like. So it made sense to
00:10:43
Speaker
to create that content for licensing, micro-licensing to these tourism operators. And just recently, actually, we've been getting a lot of interest from heritage organizations and governments who are just keen on upgrading their visitor experience to museums or to cities. Digital humanities just seems to be really taking off at the moment.
00:11:11
Speaker
One thing I was wondering, too, when you're speaking while we're talking about all these other places and apps, like I just pulled this up on the App Store again so we can have a real-time look at what's going on here. And I think there's nine different, basically, apps and places aside from the primary one there. It looks like nine altogether. The thing I'm curious about is I'm pretty sure I remember I got the ancient Jerusalem in VR one back like a year and a half ago when you handed out. That was one of your early ones.
00:11:40
Speaker
I'm pretty sure I paid $4.99 US for that, or $3.99 or something like that, but it looks like all your apps are free now. That's right. We realized, well, we were getting quite a few paid downloads, but what we realized was more important was getting eyes on the apps and getting people to know our work and to get excited about what we were doing. Because that indirectly, well, actually, when quite directly, leads to business.
00:12:09
Speaker
These potential clients download the app. They see it, they think, well, that's really cool. I want one like that. And then we'll contact us and commission one. One of the apps that showcases, if you will, a lot of our capabilities is an app called Engage. So we use that as a kind of commercial sample. It's free. If your listeners are keen on downloading it and checking it out, it has examples of all the different feature sets that are possible.
00:12:36
Speaker
I see it. Okay. We'll have links to all these in the show notes so people can go to arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech forward slash 108 and see links to all these apps. So while you have these these apps and you want you want to capture attention, you want people to look at and see them, what do you see as the distinguishing feature? What is more compelling about Lithodomos than anybody else that's making that's making 3D reconstructions?
00:13:03
Speaker
This is a question that comes up quite a lot, actually. There are lots of organizations and individuals who are diving into this space. The great thing about the time we live in is programs like Blender and virtual reality headsets and mobile smartphones.
00:13:22
Speaker
It's also cheap or free these days that anyone who's got the time and the energy to devote to it can produce some pretty great results in a fairly short time. So there's not really anything to stop others entering into this space.
00:13:39
Speaker
I'd say the biggest difference between us and others who do this is that we've noticed in the competitive space that projects seem to be bespoke one-off local concerns. For example, a university in France might spend six months and 100,000 euros to create this amazing reconstruction of their local
00:14:03
Speaker
roman theater that has you know actors and gladiators fighting and and it looks really really great it's really expensive takes a long time and then that's it it dies there's no the project doesn't go anywhere from there the the assets we've seen it all before we've seen this kind of model before they get a massive grant they they do this big project and then and then it dies
00:14:25
Speaker
So the difference between this model and us is that we are very competitive in price and we're very fast at taking, I like to say, from essay to VR or from textbook to VR experience. Those intermediary steps that these bespoke or local projects need to work out
00:14:51
Speaker
every time we are now in a repeatable process where we can turn around viewpoints or sites extremely quickly and at an extremely competitive price compared to these.
00:15:06
Speaker
these organizations. So what we're seeing is now organizations who want VR or want 3D content, look at what's involved, the prices involved. And when they start to look to outsource it, we come up and they go, oh, actually, we can outsource this 3D modeling and virtual reality part of the component of the project of Lithodomus. So we're kind of filling that niche of affordable, high quality 3D content.
00:15:35
Speaker
In the next segment, I want to ask you some things about sort of the future of all this and where things are going. But for right now, are you considering moving to any other platforms? Are you staying mobile? Do you produce for your clients for any other platforms? I'm specifically thinking about Oculus, which is growing in popularity, PlayStation VR, but that's a whole other animal developing a PlayStation game or app or something like that. You know how that works.
VR/AR Market Trends and Impact
00:16:01
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. But are you thinking about those other platforms down the line?
00:16:04
Speaker
Yeah, so at the beginning when we were testing out the market and looking at what was possible, one of our very early clients was the Living Computer Museum and Labs in Seattle. They were a very early supporter.
00:16:19
Speaker
and commissioned a range of room-scale HTC Vive experiences. We actually made, I think, about 10 experiences. For example, the Acropolis, the Odeon of Agrippa and the Athenian Agora, the Circus Maximus. In one experience, you get to sacrifice a
00:16:42
Speaker
an ox at the Roman Temple of Cordoba. There's no blood. But the idea for this was that this museum had these visitors who would queue up to use this one device. So we deliberately made the experiences around five minutes long to cut down the queues and to get people to experience them.
00:17:07
Speaker
What happened when we put those onto the market was that gamers, for example, on Steam started downloading and paying for these titles and then getting really frustrated that they were so short. And museums started getting really frustrated that they were getting too long.
00:17:27
Speaker
So we spend six months investing a lot of time and money into creating, as you say, a fully blown game for the Steam players, or we focus our attention on the tourism and cultural heritage market in Europe. So we kind of made a decision to move away from room-scale stuff for the moment. But the models are there. They're ready to be repurposed whenever we decide to go back to that.
00:17:55
Speaker
Well, yeah, that's what I was going to say. We recently got into the PlayStation stuff and there's, uh, there's definitely some, some games on there that could benefit from some better, more realistic graphics. You know what I mean? And just repurposing what you've already done in that sort of arena, you know, could help these guys out. So anyway, um, let's talk about more of that on the other side of the break. We'll take our first break right now and we'll come back in just a minute.
00:18:19
Speaker
Chris Webster here for the Archaeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archaeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R. Zencaster allows us to record high quality audio with no stress on the guest. Just send them a link to click on and that's it. Zencaster does the rest. They even do automatic transcriptions.
00:18:47
Speaker
Check out the link in the show notes for 30% off your first three months or go to zencastr.com and use the code ARCHIOTECH. That's A-R-C-H-A-E-O-T-E-C-H.
00:19:01
Speaker
Looking to expand your knowledge of x-rays and imaging in the archaeology field? Then check out An Introduction to Paleoradiography, a short online course offering professional training for archaeologists and affiliated disciplines. Created by archaeologist, radiographer, and lecturer James Elliott, the content of this course is based upon his research and teaching experience in higher education. It is approved by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists as four hours of training. That's in the UK for those of you that don't know.
00:19:26
Speaker
So, don't miss out on this exciting opportunity for professional and personal development. For more information on pricing and core structure, visit paleoimaging.com. That's P-A-L-E-O, imaging.com. And look for the link in the show notes to this episode.
00:19:43
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to the Archeotech podcast, episode 108. Today, we're talking with Simon Young about Lithodomos VR. And Simon, I want to ask you something back up a little bit. You were talking about being able to produce these sites, these models, faster and cheaper, and they're very good quality, as we can see from the examples we've seen.
00:20:03
Speaker
a few episodes back on our podcast, we had an episode called faster, better, cheaper, pick two. And you seem to be violating that, which is fine because that's what we were discussing. Is it a hard and fast principle or can it be violated under certain circumstances? What interested me most was your claim to be able to put these together fast. And we can see from the number of models that you obviously can, in fact, put these together fast. So what is it
00:20:29
Speaker
in particular, that you're doing that allows you to create these models quickly. Traditionally, in most, and I think this is a sweeping generalization, but most digital heritage or projects or archaeological projects tend to follow what we call the waterfall method in project management.
00:20:51
Speaker
So for those listeners who perhaps aren't familiar with the term, this is where it's definitely a step-by-step process to project management. So typically it might go about that a group of archaeologists get together and have a great deal of meetings and settle on concepts and put together a grant application and put the grant
00:21:16
Speaker
application into the organization that pays it out and waits several months for the money to come in and then there are more meetings where the guidelines of the projector are defined and then they go into the production phase and this can last several months and then at the end of the production phase there's a massive review phase and this process, because there are so many roadblocks and hurdles to overcome each step of the way,
00:21:45
Speaker
can drag out for a really long time. And I think as all of us are familiar with university administration or heritage administration, it can go painfully slowly. One thing I set out to do when I designed the project management system was to really challenge that.
00:22:03
Speaker
And so we apply an agile Kanban methodology to our project management where we break up all the steps in any project into their constituent components and then field them out to specialists who pick them off from a backlog or Kanban board. And this is something that will be familiar to software engineers and developers.
00:22:29
Speaker
So basically what it means is that we blow up the project into all its little component parts, we farm out those component parts to specialists and there could be three or four projects on the go at the same time and everybody's working on different parts of it and at the end it's reassembled to its final state. That's a very efficient way of working. That's fascinating.
00:22:53
Speaker
When you know what all the components are, it's easy to break them up and have people work on specific things and then bring them back together. It's like manufacturing. It's pretty good. Precisely. And one thing we realized also pretty early on is that we might think that
00:23:09
Speaker
creating the interior of Notre Dame or creating Herod's Second Temple, a wildly different project with different approaches. But we realized that the basic steps you go through are the same in both. So once we recognized what those steps were and we encoded them into a repeatable process,
00:23:32
Speaker
we were able to faithfully reproduce and estimate the time for any viewpoint to be created from essay to VR viewpoints. Yeah, when you really start breaking this stuff down, it's all basically the same. Same with archaeology. I always tell people it's just features, artifacts, and site boundaries.
00:23:54
Speaker
They're just different. And I think another really important development that we've seen probably now in the last five to six years is digitization of archaeological records. Back in the day, we would have to go to the library and find the journal and take it out of the bookshelf and photocopy the articles and take them home and use our highlighter pen to
00:24:23
Speaker
But because so many journals and articles and publications are now online or on databases, that's really accelerated our ability to access this published material. And that saves thousands of hours of physical time to go into the libraries.
00:24:45
Speaker
Maybe we as archaeologists have been a little slow to take full advantage of that. Perhaps that was my sense. Maybe I was being very slow taking advantage of it. I still like it like a good trip to the library personally.
00:25:03
Speaker
And actually, a lot of archaeological reports are still sitting on bookshelves in libraries. So yeah, we're in a really interesting moment, I think, in digitizing these publications and really virtual reality environments are just a different form of digital expression of archaeological publications.
Digitization in Archaeology
00:25:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:30
Speaker
Along those lines, as far as being in a changing atmosphere for all this, what do you see as changing in virtual reality? I'm sure you're keeping up on this space now, as you guys can keep abreast of the different changes that are happening. What are some of the big things you think are coming down the line that you guys are maybe preparing for?
00:25:48
Speaker
When the Oculus Rift development kit came out and the Samsung Gear VR, which is one of the best mobile virtual reality products on the market, when they hit about three or four years ago, I thought that the development and acceleration of the technology was going to go a lot faster.
00:26:07
Speaker
But from that breakthrough, things are tracking along nicely, but I wouldn't say there's any kind of incredible hardware breakthroughs that have happened since then.
00:26:24
Speaker
There was a lot of hype around a magic leap, which was these augmented reality glasses that promised you to be able to see whales, blue whales jumping out of your swing pool in full resolution. And when it did come out, we might recall there was a lot of criticism and disappointment about how rubbish the hardware was.
00:26:54
Speaker
developing a lot and has a way to go. But I think perhaps the biggest, the most exciting hardware release recently has been the Oculus Quest, which is an all-in-one headset that allows for room scale experiences without any cables, so an untethered
00:27:19
Speaker
room scale, high resolution, tracked room scale experience. So that's I think the biggest, the most exciting release. I think also we're seeing a lot of other all in one headsets hitting the market at the moment. There seems to be a new one every couple of months. So there's a competitive space opening up around VR hardware.
00:27:45
Speaker
Everyone talks about augmented reality as being the next big thing. And I think that is going to really transform the way we see digital content that coupled with, and here it comes, 5G.
00:28:03
Speaker
A lot of people have been talking about 5G a lot. I think it doesn't just mean that you'll be able to download lolcats a lot faster when you're on the train. I think what it means is that
00:28:19
Speaker
will be able to have a virtual reality headset or smart device with GPS that will be able to super fast download high resolution content and cache it.
00:28:34
Speaker
for when you need it, when you're there, moving on to another geolocated space, that old content goes, the new content from 5G gets cached. So this kind of cloud-based, geolocated, high-resolution data.
00:28:53
Speaker
That kind of model, I think, we'll simply seeing more of than definitely in Europe, at least I'm not sure how it is in the States, but there's a big push for smart cities. And so 5G and cultural heritage information
00:29:15
Speaker
geolocated really fits nicely into that smart city model. And there's also a lot of talk about deep linking. I'm not sure for listeners who aren't familiar with that. It's a pretty simple concept. It's been around for a while. You'll see it on your Google Maps that when you ask to go somewhere, it'll have an option now at the base of the screen to launch Uber.
00:29:40
Speaker
or a rideshare app. And this is Deep Link. So basically, Deep Link is going from one app to another and transferring data. Seems like a pretty simple concept, but it's really starting to... People are talking about it a lot now.
00:29:57
Speaker
Rather than putting all this time and effort and money into integrating the feature set of one app into another, smaller tech companies are opting for this deep linking to allow you to kind of add on features from another app within your mobile phone. So that I think is going to play a part into, because basically it means that you could add a virtual reality experience to any app through deep linking.
00:30:26
Speaker
That software, you talked about high-end hardware. How about low-end hardware? Thinking specifically about the Google Cardboard has the ubiquity of these helped hindered, how's it changing the VR landscape?
00:30:42
Speaker
Well, I think maybe last year or two, probably last year or two years ago, Homido, this company, took the Google Cardboard concept to the extreme and has stripped away the cardboard completely and marketing these snap-on
00:31:06
Speaker
glasses so basically there are two lenses suspended by a small plastic clip that clips onto the phone and basically you're looking at these lenses suspended in space at the two sides of your phone, kind of like opera glasses. So that's I think like the other extreme is just the lenses and the minimal amount of plastic.
00:31:26
Speaker
Google Cardboard, it's hard to judge how successful it's been in promoting VR. There's those who argue for the democratization of VR and the Google Cardboard making it possible for anyone to experience VR on their smartphone and this increasing awareness. I'd say that's a fair comment. But there are others who argue that the experience of the virtual reality of mobile
00:31:55
Speaker
Google Cardboard virtual reality is of such a poor quality that it turns people off VR. It's actually having the opposite effect. When people see a VR Google Cardboard experience, they think, oh, is this all that VR is? It's laggy. It's making me feel a bit dizzy. And the cardboard around my nose is left a little bit of a cut. So it's really uncomfortable.
00:32:22
Speaker
I've tried VR before, I'm not going to try it again. I guess those are the pros and cons of the Google Cardboard.
00:32:32
Speaker
What about moving on from VR? And I don't know if it's even moving on, but maybe a lateral shift into AR because from a user standpoint, it seems like virtual reality and augmented reality are very closely related to each other. But from a technological standpoint, there's probably a lot of things you have to consider with AR. But I'm more concerned with or interested in hearing your opinions on like Apple's
00:32:56
Speaker
uh, support of AR in all their devices and increasing the AR chips with inside the phones
AR vs VR: Future Prospects
00:33:01
Speaker
and tablets. And, and every time they've done a keynote at WWDC in the last couple of years, they've highlighted augmented reality and they had this huge Minecraft thing at the one this year, which was just amazing. Um, so how, how are you guys handling that in your, in your internal meetings? Yeah. So the big, the big surprise, I guess, um, for everybody during the, the, the,
00:33:24
Speaker
resurgence of mobile vr a few years ago was that apple never released a headset and samsung did and everyone was expecting the the vr headset they released a
00:33:43
Speaker
I think it was a desktop Mac and promoted the HTC Vive as the optimum VR companion to that on their landing page last year. But you're absolutely right. The focus, it seems as though Apple has skipped that VR, this VR wave and is focusing straight away on a
00:34:11
Speaker
I guess AR for a while, even the definition of it was a little bit fuzzy. Some believe that AR is the Google glasses or the HoloLens or the Magic Leap glasses that project directly
00:34:29
Speaker
a ghost, almost a piece of content onto reality and you're seeing it through these glasses. That's what AR is. Other people think that AR is Pokemon Go with your mobile phone and the camera and placing Pikachu on the street curb. So I think AR has a very wide definition of what it can mean.
00:34:56
Speaker
But the lucky thing is that when we started creating the models right at the beginning, I had AR very firmly in mind so that every single model that we create is geolocated. So we're almost, we're creating a
00:35:17
Speaker
virtual or 3D model to scale of the real world. So when the AR technology develops further or when we want to go into the AR space, our models already are placed in the world, if that makes sense. So we're ready. We're ready for it.
Educational Focus and Conference Participation
00:35:41
Speaker
Yeah. Nice.
00:35:44
Speaker
What's next down the line for Lithodomos? What are you guys working on right now? We're gearing up for the tourism season in Europe. A lot of our clients who we signed up last year are launching
00:36:00
Speaker
their on-site tours in Lisbon, in Croatia, in Rome, in Athens, in the UK, in Bulgaria, in Israel. So that's all happening at the moment, which is very exciting. And kind of pointing back to the beginning of the episode next week,
00:36:19
Speaker
will be at the Midtown Hilton in Manhattan for the American Classical League annual conference. We realized a little while back that we've created a body of work that has become a valuable potential educational resource for
00:36:39
Speaker
for history teachers, Latin teachers, Greek teachers. We've actually repurposed a few of our scenes to teach beginners Latin. So on our website, you can go to the school section and download the first three chapters of a supplementary activity where you go into VR.
00:36:59
Speaker
and you're on a Roman Corbita sailing from Ephesus toward Rome to undertake a secret mission at the Empire, but on the way you have to learn Latin. And so on the ship there are all these vocabulary items that match the first three chapters of any standard Latin textbook.
00:37:24
Speaker
So yeah, I guess what's next for us is really coming over to visit you guys in the States a little bit more and explore educational applications of our content library. We ran a really successful pilot program at Gonzaga University in Spokane with Professor Andrew Goldman.
00:37:50
Speaker
with his class of 30, where they used virtual reality throughout the course, our content library in his course, Ancient Cities. They competed to create a plan for the creation of an ancient site, Epidaurus in this case, and the winning team has won the
00:38:13
Speaker
the prize of Lithodome is creating the virtual reality content that they worked on during this semester. So that was lots of fun. And a couple of other universities are looking at trialing this virtual reality content for the fall semester. So we're starting to make an appearance in the education market.
00:38:38
Speaker
in the States and of course if there are any educators out there amongst your listeners who are interested in joining us on this incredible joint journey to bring the ancient world back to life through virtual reality then please get in touch.
00:38:54
Speaker
Yeah, I did. Absolutely. When you're in town, you really have to talk to me because I work at a school at K-12 and we use archeology a lot and we use VR some. So yes, hit me up offline. I will. I will send you an email. I think I know some people that are going to want to talk to you. Great. Fantastic. I love looking forward to it. I've never been to New York, so it's very exciting.
00:39:17
Speaker
All right, well, I guess to finish out this podcast, do you have anything for our listeners that we can put in the show notes?
Exclusive Promo Code Offer
00:39:23
Speaker
Well, I have a code for listeners that will give access to our entire content library for a few days. I think perhaps if we put the code in the show notes, I could read it out, but it's probably easier to put it in the show notes.
00:39:48
Speaker
So it's a three-day promo code, and you'll have access to the entire content library. If you jump onto our website, we've got a few downloadable PDFs. There's a self-guided walking tour of Athens. There's a self-guided walking tour of Pula in Croatia. As I mentioned, there are those three units of beginners Latin. And also there's an activity for high school kids called the last days of Pompeii, where you go through
00:40:10
Speaker
Yeah, very much easier.
00:40:17
Speaker
through different environments in Pompeii from morning to evening to discover more about Roman society. Those PDFs are free to download. I see. All right. Well, I just downloaded the Croatia one when we were on the show here. I really want to see that. I'm going to go up and plug it into my Google Cardboard and see what I can see. Excellent.
00:40:41
Speaker
I just downloaded Athens and Jerusalem. Nice. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Simon. This has been fantastic. I'm so glad you guys are doing well because there's just not enough in this space. And I don't think, I think it's an uphill battle, getting people to not see this as like video games, but seeing it as public outreach and something that
00:41:07
Speaker
is the future of archaeological representation and historical representation. I mean, how many people can actually go to these places? I mean, I'd love to go to Croatia, but it's just not, you know, possible on a daily basis. And being able to experience this stuff in this way is where the future is going, I think, for all this. Absolutely. At the core of the vision, at the very beginning, my mission was to bring the ancient world
00:41:35
Speaker
back to life for as many people as possible. And I was always really frustrated that we as archaeologists have this almost secret knowledge and excitement about what we study. And we want to share it with everyone, but at times it's difficult to visualize it or to explain it. So that's our primary driver. Paul, anything to wrap up? No, I'm glad for the work that you're doing, Simon, and I hope to see a lot more in the future.
00:42:04
Speaker
Excellent. Thank you very much guys for the opportunity to speak today. Thanks for coming. Yeah. Thank you. All right. So check out that code and all the links to the Lithodomos VR applications. There's a lot of them.
00:42:19
Speaker
And they're all free now, so you can go check those out. Free to download anyway. Some of them have the in-app stuff, but we've got a code for one of those, as Simon mentioned. So check out arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech forward slash 108 for that code. And we will be back in just a minute with our app of the day segment.
00:42:41
Speaker
You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:43:01
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to the Architect Podcast. It is now time for the App of the Day segment. And last time, Chris, you were teasing me for my standard disclaimer where I say, this doesn't really have anything to do with archaeology or really any use for archaeologists, but you might like it because I do. So today's app, the one I've chosen,
00:43:24
Speaker
could potentially have something to do with archaeology. If you're into site formation processes or maybe castle ruins, because what I picked today is a very simple game called Castle Wreck.
00:43:40
Speaker
It's absolutely the stupidest game and it is also so satisfying. The idea is there's a castle and you have a cannon and you get to aim your cannon at the castle and fire off shots until the castle itself is destroyed.
00:43:57
Speaker
It is it is mindless. I don't normally play games on my on my phone. I just they don't appeal to me. This is just pure visceral sort of, you know, click and watch it go. And what makes it really neat is that all the bricks in the castle when they come down and the planks in the in the roof and such all fall in interesting ways, realistic ways. Some of them
00:44:17
Speaker
Some of the castles have hidden TNT caches and those blow up and send pieces flying up into the air and they land in the water around the castle and make little splashes and the whole time that's doing that you get haptic feedback through the phone. It's just incredibly satisfying stupid little game to waste some time with and I'm enjoying that kind of it right now.
00:44:39
Speaker
Yeah, so it's available for Android and for iOS. And the big gotcha with it is it is full of ads. I mean, there are pop up ads, there are banner ads. And after you've knocked down a castle or two, you get to watch like little movie ads for other stupid games.
00:44:58
Speaker
Yeah, the company is called Voodoo and they have a bunch of similar sort of just games stripped down to their bare essence, you know, try to do something, you know, shoot a target, run someplace or in this case, you know, knock down a castle with a cannonball. That's their niche and, you know, good on them for doing that. And, you know, it's amazing to me that this thing can be as much fun for me as it is.
00:45:27
Speaker
Nice, nice. Another solid offering, Paul. Yeah, this is useful. It's research. I'm telling you, now that I've knocked down a castle, I know what to expect when I'm in Yemen looking at the castles that I've explored. And maybe I can build some models from this, right?
00:45:46
Speaker
Nice. Nice. All right then. My app is a hundred percent useless for archeology. However, it could be fun and it will likely make you vomit. So it's called VR tunnel race. And I found this because when we first reconnected with Simon about Lithodomos VR, he sent a link to the, um, uh, the explore app that they have. And, uh, I kind of went down a little VR rabbit hole on the app store looking for other VR stuff. Cause they have a whole category for virtual reality things.
00:46:16
Speaker
And then I think a lot of the manufacturers that are making stuff specifically for a VR headset and really kind of eyeing the Google Cardboard, which if you don't have a Google Cardboard or you don't know what we're talking about, it's literally a Cardboard VR device that you drop your phone in. And I think you can get them for less than like $15 on Amazon, I think. So pick up one of those if you just want to check out some of this stuff, because it's super easy. And there's all kinds of tutorials online for
00:46:42
Speaker
kind of essentially making your own, but it can be a little tricky. It's easier just to plop on an Amazon and buy it. But anyway, I'm always interested in racing games and things like that. And this VR tunnel race, oh my God, it's probably the Google Cardboard format where it's not quite perfect because it's designed for literally everybody. So you get a little cross-eyed. I feel like I'm in that movie, The Jerk, you know that with... Oh no, with the glasses.
00:47:08
Speaker
the glasses where somebody's going to have to send me a dollar later on because I am cross-eyed for the rest of my life to reimburse me for those glasses. But I feel like that's how Google's going to go down. They're going to have to pay everybody like the jerk for Steve Martin movie for the glasses. But anyway, VR Tunnel Race is actually super fun. I've only played it a few times because I just really didn't want to get into it. But it's a stupid, mindless game. And you basically just
00:47:34
Speaker
You're in like this circle and it takes a minute to realize, but you're in kind of a tunnel and there's these things moving and you got to, you're basically, it's an endless moving sort of game and it goes faster and faster and faster as you go along and you tilt the cardboard left or right to basically tilt your perspective through this tunnel. But what makes you want to vomit is the fact that the colors are all like right there. It's very close. Um, it starts out very high contrast and it's just a little bit jarring, but
00:48:01
Speaker
I found that if I just relaxed a little bit and then kept playing it for like past a few minutes, that your brain just adjusts and you get used to it. You get used to the format. Then you pull your eyes away from the damn thing and it's back again in your own room. Like, oh my God, it's just weird the way VR works like that.
00:48:20
Speaker
So anyway, check it out. There's tons of free VR games that you can check out. And they've got the, I think I started to say this earlier, but there's a little icon that looks like the Google Cardboard on most of these VR games. If VR is not explicitly in the title, there's a little Google Cardboard icon right on the app usually, at least on the ones on the Apple Store. And I've seen this ones on a few of the Google Play Store as well.
00:48:42
Speaker
Check that out. Have some fun, especially if you've already got a Google Cardboard. Hell, go get a Google Cardboard so you can check out some of these Lithodomo apps. I mean, they're free and they're really pretty cool. One thing Simon didn't mention is they have sounds in things like ambient sounds and narration in some of these where you can click on something and get some sort of narration about what it is.
00:49:08
Speaker
And that's pretty cool. So some of the higher end VR apps have that kind of stuff. Most of them are these fast moving kind of move around in a space type of games. Because you don't really have any control. You're just kind of a passenger in these games because of the nature of the format.
00:49:24
Speaker
Basically, yeah. Now, when you get into something like PlayStation VR or Oculus or something like that, they have controllers in which you can interact with your environment rather than just sort of react to your environment. And the only thing you can do is react when you're on a phone because you can't actually touch your phone. There's one button on the Google VR that basically pushes one spot on your screen when you push it, and that button can be activated to do something. And that's how Lithodomos uses it.
00:49:49
Speaker
If you see something you want to click on, you just push that one button, which taps your screen for you. And then you can interact with that thing, but that's basically it. Well, that's if you have one of the VR, the Google Cardboards that has a button, because a lot of them don't even have a button. And the ones like what Simon was talking about that are just fold out glasses, I've got one of those. You get a hotspot and you hover over a button on the display in order to press the button. So you hover there for a second, and then it presses.
00:50:17
Speaker
If you have a button, that's a way step ahead above. Yeah. Well, you know, the other thing, since we've got some time left in this segment, the other thing I want to kind of bring up too is I don't know who's seen the Ender's Game movie, but they, and in all the books too, I've read, I think I've read a lot of the books in that Ender's Game series. And one of the things I really liked
00:50:41
Speaker
And I think this is probably how things would go. We have eye tracking software right now. It's been the high, high, high-end models that aren't even probably commercially available to most people, at least at the entertainment sector. But they're able to track your eyes. And we have that software in vehicles. They do that for vehicle testing to make sure people aren't looking down at their phones. And if you do, it gives you this warning that you're not paying attention to the road kind of thing.
00:51:06
Speaker
But using eye tracking software is one thing, but also the blinking. Once you get used to doing stuff like that, and that's what they did in the Anders game series, they would basically blink out commands. They would look at something and blink on it one, two, three times or something like that. And with eye tracking and blinking, those two things, it knows what you're looking at and it knows what you're trying to activate, similar to just clicking with your mouse. Your eyeballs turn into a mouse. And I think that's where this will really go. Now, the way to do that on a phone is going to be that you're going to have to put
00:51:36
Speaker
that detecting material into the glass of the phone because when you put it into something like Google Cardboard, you really block off a lot of the phone. So it would have to be somewhere or a redesigned cardboard sort of thing where we'll actually do that face tracking. Apple is actually really close to that because with the face ID,
00:51:52
Speaker
at the top of the phone. If they can just put that in the bezel on the side and then you redesign the cardboard a little bit, that face ID should be able to look at your eyes and adjust and do something with them because they're already doing it. You know, it's like the Memoji thing where you can make your face a
00:52:09
Speaker
unicorn head and then when you blink it blinks when you stick your tongue out it sticks its tongue out it's creepy how accurate it is creepy like you can scowl you can smile you can puff your cheeks out you can do whatever you want and it reads all that in real time so we're so close to having really cool things but we're just not quite there yet
00:52:30
Speaker
Yeah, thinking about all this for archaeology, like I mentioned at the end and Simon was mentioning, I think you did Paul too, is really the accessibility to all these things and just making it real for people around the world that might not have that ability to go there.
00:52:45
Speaker
Even if you do have the ability to go there, do we need the carbon footprint of actually going to all these places? I mean, I'm not saying don't travel. I want to travel and see everything, but I'd rather use my very finite resources to say, well, I've explored all these areas in virtual reality and I want to pick this one to go to rather than picking something based on Google images or a Yelp search or Travelocity and then being disappointed when I get there. I'd rather tour it virtually.
00:53:10
Speaker
And then, okay, I really need to experience this place in real life because I, and I now know how to best entertain myself while I'm there and see the best things because I've already toured it virtually. And I think that's, you know, that's a better experience too. I don't know thoughts, Paul.
00:53:25
Speaker
No, I agree with you. It doesn't have to supplant the real world, but we can definitely enhance an augment and displace temporally and spatially how we represent things in the past.
00:53:42
Speaker
and allow people to experience things that they otherwise couldn't because they can't physically get to the place or it's been destroyed or any of the million different reasons that we all know about. But it's a cool world we're living in right now in terms of these emerging technologies.
00:54:00
Speaker
Okay. Well, I think we'll just call it right there. Then we went a little long. So app of the day, you had, um, an app that's going to make people vomit and I had one that's going to annoy them with popups, but they're still going to play it.
00:54:17
Speaker
Solid work today. Excellent. This is a great public service right here. I think we'll have zero listeners by the next time we release an episode. We can only hope. Squad goals. That's right.
00:54:32
Speaker
All right. Well, again, check out all the links in the show notes. There's going to be a ton of them this time, arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech, and that's A-R-C-H-A-E-O-T-E-C-H forward slash 108. If you just head over to the archaeology podcast network page,
00:54:49
Speaker
Archaeotech's got a link right there and you can find the episode through that. You can also type in Lithodomos on the search field, or probably virtual reality will be my guess, right in the search field on the main page and see all the podcasts that we have about either Lithodomos or anything else in VR because we have talked about it before. Hopefully, I put that in the show notes and you can find it.
00:55:11
Speaker
All right, well, uh, go get your, your, you know, your, your barf bags and, um, uh, your, your bourbon, because you're going to need both playing Paul's game and then my game and then lifted almost. We are a little history in there at the same time. So thanks, Paul. Yeah. Thank you, Chris. All right. We'll see you guys next time.
00:55:33
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:55:59
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:56:20
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.