Global Digital Heritage World Conference
Joining talented digitisation professionals for 3 days in a medieval Spanish castle...
Early in May, the kind folks at Global Digital Heritage (GDH) invited me to Sigüenza, Spain for their World Conference, to meet their team and to share a short presentation among a humbling lineup of other speakers.
Outside of the conference sessions, attendees were very well taken care of with wonderful food & drink, guided tours to beautiful local historic sites, and practical demonstrations of advanced 3D digitisation techniques.
Needless to say, I had a great time and I share a little bit about my experience below…
If you would like to hire me to meet with folks from your organisation and talk about the current and future possibilities of 3D in the cultural heritage sector, please drop me a message!
The GDH World Conference
I have been aware of Global Digital Heritage’s prodigious 3D output from my days at Sketchfab, and if you are not aware of GDH’s work, I recommend you check them out! A global network of scientists, researchers, cultural heritage professionals, GDH prioritises digitisation of under represented historic sites and subjects, and prides itself on making all the data it collects freely available for download under open licensing.
GDH’s World Conference, taking place over 3 days at the beginning of May 2024 and hosted at the impressive medieval castle hotel Parador de Sigüenza, was a celebration of the many digital heritage initiatives that GDH is involved with. It was also a chance for team members to share their latest research and digitisation initiatives with their colleagues.
I can honestly say that each of the 20+ presentations delivered over the course of the conference were worthy of anyone’s attention who is interested in the field of 3D digitisation. Just a few of my personal favorites are shared below:
Néstor F. Marqués presented the newly updated GDH website, which tackles the not insignificant task of presenting a GDH’s huge portfolio of projects and library of 3D models in an effective manner. Now, in addition to exploring GDH’s work by project, visitors to the site can navigate the same content via a map interface, and (even more impressive) a search of all GDH 3D models, filterable by country, region, site, material, and time period. Each 3D model listing (e.g. this iron age Iberian ceramic vessel) includes a great implementation of the Sketchfab 3D viewer with the ability to take measurements, switch to predefined orthographic views, and export an image snapshot snapshot. A ‘Dossier’ for each listing also supplies essential metadata and paradata for that subject’s digitisation process. GG GDH!! 🤯
Professor Stefano Campana, University of Siena and Giuseppe Prospero Cirigliano, Lecce IMT from Italy shared their research partnership which applies AI segmentation to aerial LiDAR datasets to reveal archaeological features that were previously hidden beneath foliage canopy.
Carlos Carpetudo showed how historical 3D reconstruction projects are undertaken, and introduced the excellent yet simple idea of a “scale of evidence” whereby different parts of a 3D reconstruction can be colour coded by how much academic evidence supports the reconstruction, thus helping viewers to understand how much of a reconstruction is evidence based vs. how much is hypothesis or interpretation.
Dr. Siddique Motala, shared the latest work from Global Digital Heritage Afrika, a new research group at the University of Cape Town. This presentation introduced me to the concepts of both hauntology (in this case how historical discriminatory boundaries persist in population demographics in Cape Town) and “Counter surveying” as a way to remember and locate buildings and homes of families forcibly displaced under apartheid law and government practice.
My Two Cents
I was also invited to give a presentation during the summit and—being happy to sing for my supper—I put together a presentation entitled “GDH in Context: Trends in the Spatial Heritage Sector” for the occasion. My motivation was to share some thoughts regarding trends in the cultural heritage sector related to the use of 3D and spatial technologies.
From an initial list of ‘hot topics’, I drilled down to five themes that I thought were of particular relevance to to GDH as an organisation: storytelling, mass digitisation, digitisation standards, interoperability, and data accessibility.
Motivated by an understanding the quality and volume of GDH’s digitisation practice and outputs, I also presumed to suggest that GDH (as if they are not busy enough!) share their research and workflows more actively with the heritage sector establishment. I suggested that this might take the form of training and knowledge sharing inititives, engaging more with existing interoperability initiatives like the IIIF 3D Community Group and openUSD, and authoring and publishing 3D experiences designed to reach new online audiences.
Some Fun
By way of illustrating the last of my suggestions, I had prepared some demos to share with the conference audience that I hoped would inspire some exploration of new ways to engage audiences with history and culture with interactive 3D.
Mobile AR
As I browsed GDH’s vast library of open access historical 3D on Sketchfab, I began gathering an “AR handling collection” of hats, masks, rings, and other objects. I wanted to begin exploring what it means to digitally handle or experience an object in 3D, perhaps in the same or a similar way to which it was used in real life.
After downloading them from Sketchfab, I used RapidCompact to further optimise the 3D models for import into Meta Spark Studio and Snap AR Lens Studio to create the AR filter demos shown in the video above.
You can try out the ‘rings’ Snap AR demo via a regular webcam here.
Interactive Games
I’ve tinkered a bit before with UEFN, to explore playful ways to interact with historical 3D content. It was easy enough to spin up a couple of demos using 3D models from GDH - including flying a biplane around a 3D scan of a castle that was very close to our real location at the conference :)
Whether it’s in Fortnite, Roblox, VR Chat or other hubs for user generated content, I think there is a real opportunity to present cultural heritage content to audiences in playful, fun ways thanks to 3D digitisation.
Geolocation
I used Cesium’s Stories tools to geolocate a small collection of castles that have been digitised by GDH and create an interactive world tour. I think putting things back in context in a global scale works particularly well for architectural scans and can provide a nice comparison of a certain aspect of human activity (in this case building castles) across countries and cultures.
You can try the castle tour demo for yourself here.
Scrollytelling
I love the scrollytelling format: it reduces the barrier to interacting with 3D data on the web massively by only requiring a user to scroll a webpage to begin manipulating the 3D (and/or other) data. I cooked up a quick demo using an annotated GDH 3D model on Sketchfab using this in-depth guide by Klaas Nienhuis of devfab.io.
Some 3D Captures
I could not, of course, visit the lands of Don Quixote without capturing a few 3D souvenirs… Links to 3D meshes and gaussian splats in the order that they appear in the video below, all captured using a smartphone:
Polychrome Wood Carving, XVI C., Museo de Arte Sacro de San Gil (Polycam / Sketchfab)
Bell Headstock, Church of Santiago, Sigüenza (Scaniverse)
Medieval well at Parador de Sigüenza (Scaniverse)
Cristo del perdón. Iglesia de la Trinidad,Atienza, Guadalajara (Luma AI)
San Gil, Museo de Arte Sacro de San Gil (Luma AI)
Thank you, Global Digital Heritage!
I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing a big about the GDH conference and what I got up to as part of it.
All that remains is to re-iterate my thanks to the Global Digital Heritage team for their kind invitation and hosting me during the event 😊🙏🙇♂️