Realistic Rendering of Augmented Reality Heritage Exhibitions

The preservation of cultural heritage is a key concern for museums and other cultural heritage institutions. Another important issue is the limited space available to exhibit their collections to their visitors. Although a number of experimental systems based on advanced information and communication technologies such as Web3D, virtual reality and augmented reality have been previously developed they have not really managed to become popular mainly because they were used for passive viewing and limited interaction. This paper presents how realistic augmented reality kiosk exhibitions of museum collections, including galleries and artefacts, can be developed so that they can attract the visitor’s attention. Advanced computer graphics rendering algorithms such as interactive lighting and shading, fake, soft and hard shadows as well as reflections are combined with a high-level augmented reality tangible interface presented in real-time performance.

Cyberaesthetics – Some Basic Theses

Referring to Sidey Myoo’s motto - „There is one human and there are two worlds” - I would like to suggest a different perception of hybrid reality in which our doubled or multiplied “self” in a natural way experiences “multiple realities”. Cyberaesthetics is not only an aesthetic phenomena with the prefix “cyber”. Separating a phenomenon of cyberculture sphere from phenomena of new media sphere is a mistake. Therefore I try to think about cyberculture and cyberaesthetics in terms of their mutual relations with the world of new media. This is integrative and not oppositional thinking. Cyberaesthetics is an attempt at describing the way in which new media shape and co-create cyberculture. And the latter is expressed in new media art (cyberart). So, let's create a cyberaesthetics as a contemporary version of aesthetics being the first domain of knowledge providing insight into our ontological and epistemological entanglements in the world of web practices. 

The annual gathering in Berlin for transmediale - Germany’s marathon of art, technology, culture, offering to 20,000 visitors per year a rich program of exhibitions, conferences, screenings, performances and culture hacks has become an essential fixture in the calendar of the international community of media art professionals, artists, activists and students.

The modern world is characterized by thousands of the visual stimuli, and the way of its viewing is a part of human activity. The conscious watching gives the sense to the things we are looking on, so viewing we work out the social relationships. Different people seeing the same thing react differently. The same sightseeing is given the different meanings.