Marea + VR3Lab
- Medium Type
- Interactive floor
- Year
- 2020
- Venue
- Marea – Centro di Cultura del Mare di Gallipoli
- Components
- Proiettori LCD, Microsoft Kinect V1, Mini PC
- Language
- C#
- Software
- Unity
- Team
- Michele Fiorentino, Vito Manghisi, Francesco Laera, Serafino Scigliuzzo, Renato Pacella
Gallipoli is a charming town located at the extreme of the heel of Italy. Its characteristic beaches are interspersed with rock banks that emerge from the seabed, suitable for hosting a variety of animal and plant species. Through an interactive floor, the museum Edutainment System recreates two typical scenarios. Visitors can interact with dolphins, turtles, sharks and whales by “stroking them with their hands”, receiving textual and audiovisual information, with beneficial effects on concepts such as protection and enhancement of the sea.
Marea, Centro di Cultura del Mare, hosts an interactive virtual seabed projected by a Mini PC in the marine habitat room. Prior to the implementation of the project, the museum used an Oceanic commercial seabed, with little relevance to places and limited interactivity and limited educational content. The “Mediterranean Interactive Floor” – MIF project, in collaboration with the Vr3lab of the Polytechnic of Bari, has re-engineered the existing hardware for an Open Source system with two scenarios of the seabed of Gallipoli, with local flora and fauna, in collaboration with the staff and the Emys experts. The benefits were: achieving educational goals, improving engagement, increasing the number of visitors, to consolidate the museum’s identity. This project being Open source is expandable and can be used as a didactic laboratory of computer science and interactive graphics and also extended to other applications even outside the museum, for example in schools and events related to the sea.
One of the key elements of the project lies in the local multimedia contents of the territory. Giuseppe Caridi’s dives collected snapshots of the marine environment of Gallipoli. Video footage with drones was used, environmental sounds acquired, marine and environmental experts have been consulted to allow the Vr3lab of the Polytechnic at University of Bari to create the two different sea beds (sand and rocks). The result is a one-of-a-kind interactive product rich in local culture: visitors can interact and learn. The results will also be studied to improve the experience using statistical approaches to joint scientific publications.
Biografie
MAREA
The Marea Sea Culture Center, a project curated by the Emys Association, configures new narratives of the sea with the help of technologies and multimedia and interactive tools.
Not hosting exhibits, the multimedia museum set-up is a tale of the sea, including audiovisual content, augmented and virtual reality. Visitors dive in it, discovering its inhabiting community.
A multimodal path, therefore, but also a cognitive path studded with narratives and stimuli for interactivity and the visitor’s dialogue with what he hears and sees.
For a complete experience, the path ends with Oculus Virtual Reality viewers with immersion in the seabed, habitat of dolphins, turtles, sea snakes, rays, sharks and whales.
VR3Lab
The Virtual Reality and Reality Reconstruction Lab is a multidisciplinary research facility for the development and testing of innovative tools and methods in engineering and medicine whose mission is to design and apply cutting-edge technologies in augmented and virtual reality, data visualization, industry 4.0, industrial automation and optimization of product cycles.
VR3Lab provides standalone CAD kernels (commercial or open source), immersion in modeling and simulation Technologies to fix and optimize manufacturing such as solid modeling, or aesthetic, structural and kinematic simulations, in-depth material modeling, development of technical drawings, or the development of interactive manuals.
