Dissemination of Environmental Soundscape and Musical Heritage Through 3D Virtual Telepresence

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of a 3D environment telepresence visualization interface, aiming at the remote experience and dissemination of musical cultural heritage and environmental soundscapes to the public, utilizing the latest technology available. The architecture of the application is consisting of a server database containing the scientific data collected, and client applications that allow multiple users to enter the 3D environment and interact simultaneously. Based on Unreal 4 graphic engine and developed for a wide variety of platforms, devices and operating systems (i.e. Linux, Macintosh, Windows or Android), these client applications can be ported to PC, tablets, mobile phones and ultimately to any web browser supporting HTML5. To accommodate the dynamic nature of a musical and soundscape heritage archive, expansions will be publicly available through regular updates and client patches. The main research challenges in the domain of cultural heritage informatics are novel data capture in many formats under a variety of conditions and provision of semantically-based representation, search and editing information technologies to support processing, management and dissemination of cultural content and environments. There is a number of parameters that can affect cultural content digitization process: accuracy, volumes of data, variety of capture conditions, material types, environmental challenges. The technical side of exploitation includes the music production of selected samples out of the recorded material and a modern environment for management and dissemination of all the collected material from Audio-Visual Ecology and Ionian Music Archive (IMA) projects (#D10, D12/MIS35600—EU funded), using the 3D virtual technology.