DigitalHeritage2013

Creating digital learning sessions for young audiences in museums and heritage sites
Katherine Biggs 

This tutorial, led by Katherine Biggs from the British Museum’s Samsung Digital Discovery Centre (SDDC), will provide participants with key recommendations for developing digital sessions for informal learning, and an understanding of how to implement these recommendations within a heritage site or museum. 
The SDDC runs an extensive digital learning programme to support young visitors’ engagement with the museum’s collection. This interactive half-day tutorial will share recommendations based on practical examples from the SDDC to provide participants with ideas to plan their own informal digital education sessions within cultural sites, specifically within object-based learning. 
The key learning objectives of the tutorial are twofold: for participants to go away with a greater understanding of how digital technology is currently being used within museum education, and to empower them to implement this. The tutorial will look at three key areas within the development of digital learning sessions: audience, content, and the technology used. Within this, it will cover the potential problems of using digital technology within a heritage site. 
During this tutorial, participants will specifically see how two digital sessions for families were developed to accompany temporary exhibitions at the British Museum: an animation workshop linked to Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind; and an augmented reality code-making session around Contemporary Chinese seals. Participants will then have the opportunity to design their own digital activity using assets from an upcoming British Museum exhibition. Working collaboratively, they will need to consider their audience, content and technology used. Participants wanting to tailor their learning to their own site will be able to bring their own assets to the session. 
The extensive digital programming implemented by the British Museum’s Samsung Digital Discovery Centre (SDDC) puts it in a unique position. The SDDC delivers informal digital learning sessions 50 weekends a year for over 6,000 family visitors, providing us with a large amount of experience and evidence as to how digital technology can best be utilised within object-based learning. These sessions span the Museum’s diverse collection and are created for different audiences, which means that this tutorial will be relevant to a range of audiences.
This session would particularly suit educators looking to introduce or expand their digital learning offering, but is also relevant to those who have a general interest in the capabilities of digital learning for young audiences in cultural sites. 

Creating interactive 3D WebApps using X3DOM
Holger Graf and Yvonne Jung

In recent years a new trend for interactive 3D graphics from large scale macro VR worlds to micro scale 3D interactive visual environments, that can be deployed on any platform and device became visible. One of the pushing factors is the availability of new smartphones, that provide miniaturised platforms and dedicated enabling technologies for the rendering of and interaction with 3D content. WebGl as a subset of OpenGL drove significantly the developments of 3D applications for the web and enabled traditional web browsers to render interactive 3D content implementing an extension to its DOM. Using JS and CSS, thus, it is then possible to customise rendering and interaction through simple HTML5 technologies. As it is deployable also in browser instances for smartphones, 3D interactive visual environments become available on mobile devices. One of the challenges is to embed webGL calls into a higher level of abstraction that at the same time allows for a declarative description of the scene to be rendered. X3DOM is one environment that at the same time enables the development as well as the deployment of interactive 3D declarative content for the web. This tutorial is intended to be a quick start for people who have no experience with 3D graphics so far but want to try out X3DOM. Authoring X3DOM content is very similar to authoring HTML. The tutorial introduces declarative 3D in HTML5, how to integrate 3D elements into the DOM, adding dynamics using adequate scripting through JavaScript and styling via CSS. It is intended for non-experts or newbies to 3D graphics and web design professionals alike.

Evaluation criteria in digital heritage
Sorin Hermon

This panel aims at discussing the criteria to be used when evaluating scientific achievements in the field of digital heritage. 

WebApp Development for Enhanced Cultural Heritage Experience through mobile Augmented Reality
Timo Engelke and Jens Keil

The use of mobile devices in cultural heritage is still a new field of research, while the amount of potential applications grows from day to day. Due to the enormous increase of technological capabilities, mobile devices are suitable for performing Augmented Reality in cultural heritage applications.
During the last 10 years, Fraunhofer IGD has developed the mobile application framework “instantAR” for iOS and Android devices enabling high-level development of Augmented Reality solutions. It provides an efficient environment for the development of AR applications on mobile devices based on common standards like HTML, Javascript and X3D. While providing convenient interfaces and abstractions it maintains great flexibility in order to also realise advanced interaction paradigms for AR.
The full day tutorial will introduce into the concepts of the "instantAR" framework, its provided development environment, discuss the possibilities for deploying standards in AR-Systems, demonstrate its capabilities and present the full range of potentials for a deployment in research and commercial environments targeting diverse stakeholders in the cultural heritage domain. Attendees will learn basics and advanced solutions for tracking technologies, how to use them and add advanced interaction capabilities supporting not only single- but also multi-touch gestures in order to create a higher user experience. The authoring environment will provide an ideal platform to integrate several technological building blocks into one coherent application by allowing an integration of user driven content.
The target audience is not restricted to research and development but also addresses designers, web developers, education, curatorship and managers of cultural heritage institutions.