Immersive Inscribed Spaces - Bringing Virtuality to Written Artefacts for Humanities

DOI

Writing is an essential cultural technique, and the resulting artefacts are an important part of cultural heritage. The Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural long-term project dedicated to studying so-called ‘written artefacts (WA)’. Our work introduces immersive technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality to the research cluster for the first time.

In this paper, we outline the scope of our research project and present our current implementations of immersive applications based on two scenarios involving inscribed spaces. So far, immersive technologies have not been used in academia to create research focused applications for exploring, analysing, and understanding WA within their inscribed space, including providing access to appropriate spatial and temporal contexts. Thus, we collaborate closely with researchers from the humanities to create interactive and immersive applications for the novel field of WA research.

The results of our preliminary user study show high ratings in the sense of presence in the virtual environments and indicate that immersive spatial context could add new perspectives for understanding WA. We hope to provide valuable insights on the design of immersive applications to support future research in novel fields.

Public Access Article © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

The research for this paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/icom-2022-0012
Related Identifier Cites https://doi.org/10.2312/egve.20211325
Metadata Access https://www.fdr.uni-hamburg.de/oai2d?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:fdr.uni-hamburg.de:10128
Provenance
Creator Gabel, Jenny ORCID logo; Berns, Christof ORCID logo; Bosch, Sebastian ORCID logo; Eickmeyer, Jost; Harter-Uibopuu, Kaja ORCID logo; Martin, Nathalie; Osthof, Ann Lauren ORCID logo; Steiger, Johann Anselm; Steinicke, Frank ORCID logo
Publisher Universität Hamburg
Publication Year 2022
Rights Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International; Open Access; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
OpenAccess true
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Journal article; Text
Discipline Design; Fine Arts, Music, Theatre and Media Studies; Humanities