Physical and Augmented Dynamics of a Cultural Event

Abstract

The Taiwan Lantern Festival (TLF) is a specific cultural tradition that has evolved over many years. It is a large-scale festival as determined by the large number of installations and visitors—that is, 20 million visitors in a period of two weeks. The aim of this study is to combine the TLF-related physical dynamics of land use and lantern installations with the augmented dynamics of lantern installations at reallocated sites. We compared five cities in Taiwan with regard to land alterations between 2016 and 2020. The TLF land assessment identified 34 cross-referred types of land use between aerial imagery and GIS surveys in a small area of 2 km × 2 km, in total. The change in land use by year varied between 2% and 499%, up to three times. The complexity of physical dynamics was re-experienced by a more sustainable dynamic of augmented reality (AR) using a scan-to-AR approach to reactivate the installations and fabrics at redeployed sites. The installations of the 2016 TLF were applied. We found that the land use, 3D scan, and AR reshaped the spatio-temporal festivalscape by both types of dynamics. The simulation demonstrated that the fabric retrieved by heterogeneous technologies had equal importance in assessing the host city and in enabling a reactivation for more diversified scales and characters, even with a smartphone AR.