FAYETTEVILLE -- Virtual reality is creating new opportunities for a group of University of Arkansas researchers whose work often involves historic or archaeological sites.
"We're not part of the research that's developing the technology, but what we are doing is helping find ways in which it can be used," said Jack Cothren, director of UA's Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies.
New headsets allow for visual immersion in digital worlds, such as the center's re-creation of a World War II-era Japanese internment camp.
With high-tech goggles that shift perspective, a user can turn his head to take in the view from inside a room or alongside some of the camp's low-slung housing barracks.
The actual camp buildings in southeastern Arkansas fell into ruin decades ago, but virtual reality creates sharp details like the wood pattern on a porch and ivy growing along an exterior wall. The ability with a few keystrokes to move up and down steps and walk around corners make for a vivid -- if at times physically disorienting -- experience.
It's unclear if other center projects eventually will be seen on special virtual-reality viewers, as such headset technology becomes available for sale in the coming months. The Oculus Rift brand of headsets is expected to be available for consumers early next year, according to published reports.
Not likely to be available for viewing is the center's most-publicized work -- digital models of renowned archaeological sites like the pyramids in Egypt. A television series called Time Scanners that aired last year on Public Broadcasting Service stations showed UA researchers at several sites using laser-scanning technology to gather data for building such models.
"There's a term that seems to be catching on, and that's 'reality capture,'" said Malcolm Williamson, a research associate with the center featured in the television series.
The center's researchers use scanners that emit a laser beam that bounces back from a wall or object, allowing for the identification of a point relative to the position of the instrument. The laser scanners allow for the quick collection of large amounts of such data.
But Cothren said trying to convert the scans into an immersive viewing experience runs up against the limits of current technology.
For a virtual-reality experience to be responsive to a user, "you have to move a lot of data quickly, all the time," Cothren explained.
Scans of sites allow for the collection of precise details like irregular surfaces, unlike typical computer graphics built using a combination of artistic images and the manipulation of relatively simple polygon graphics.
"Instead of having four planes, you've got 5 billion points," Cothren said, explaining the difference. Another complication involves the rights to the data itself, he said.
But the technical obstacles likely have a solution, he said.
"We think that there's technology that's being developed by companies that will at least get closer to solving that problem, and they may get there. In fact, they probably will get there," Cothren said.
Rather than capturing an existing physical environment through technology, the internment camp project involves re-creating a site based on information from photos, documents and old video.
Grant money from the National Park Service supports a website built by UA researchers, risingabove.cast.uark.edu, which features detailed information about the Rohwer Japanese American Relocation Center that housed more than 8,000 people during its existence.
The website includes a virtual camp tour for display on a typical computer screen. Researchers just recently built the virtual tour for the Oculus Rift.
But whether this version becomes public depends on input from the National Park Service, Williamson said, calling it a possibility. Translating the original model into an immersive virtual-reality program posed no big technological challenges, he said.
"The effort is in creating the scene in the first place," Williamson said, adding that work continues to add more detail for the re-creation of the Rohwer site.
He said the headset virtual tour was a hit with schoolteachers who viewed it during a recent conference for the Environmental and Spatial Technology Initiative, a nonprofit education initiative aiming to promote service learning.
A separate group of UA researchers is focused on educational possibilities for virtual reality. David Fredrick, an associate professor in classical studies, also is director of UA's Tesseract Center for Immersive Environments and Game Design.
"I think headsets will definitely transform how we learn and certainly how we game," Fredrick said.
The lab is developing game-based educational courses such as an introductory class on classical Rome. Students will take on a role as a member of an elite Roman family in the game and make strategic decisions, learning about the time period as they play, Fredrick said.
He said the course will be offered in January through UA's Global Campus, the unit of the university devoted to online learning. Fredrick said he hopes to have a few students test a portion of the game on the Oculus Rift.
Experts outside Arkansas described other applications -- and limitations -- of virtual reality.
"We're very much starting this second wave of virtual reality," said Jacki Morie, founder and chief scientists at All These Worlds LLC, explaining that the technology is becoming available at a much lower cost than several years ago.
However, "we're at a very strange time, when nobody's making money off of VR except for people getting money from venture capitalists," Morie said. Her company does virtual-reality work for several clients, including NASA.
She said Google now offers a simplified virtual-reality headset called Google Cardboard, which works in conjunction with a smartphone to provide a headset viewer. Morie said the company is pushing what's known as Google Expeditions to deploy the setup for use in schools as a way to provide virtual field trips.
Google counts as a partner in the project Alchemy VR, a studio that's part of London-based Atlantic Productions, the company that worked with the UA researchers on the Time Scanners television project.
Cothren said the center has not spoken directly with the company about any virtual-reality applications related to the Time Scanners projects.
W.N. Martin, co-director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, said one concern for scholars is that virtual worlds might plant a false reality in the minds of users.
When describing sites long erased from physical existence, "these models require you to make a lot of decisions," Martin said, with "lots and lots of things to extrapolate and imagine."
He described a project that attempted to re-create an 1860s-era internment camp for American Indians.
"You can show some of the buildings and what the general landscape was," Martin said. But that may not effectively communicate the experience of living in such an environment, he said.
Some of the problem involves making digital worlds with a less-than-sleek appearance, he said.
"Dirt is a hard thing to portray in these models," Martin said.
Cothren said virtual reality holds promise for scientists and industry in general, adding that the center is working with another researcher interested in hydrology models, for example.
"It's just another level of immersion in the data and being able to interpret the results better and put things together that have always been separated in time and space," Cothren said. "Put it all together and maybe it becomes suddenly, maybe it's obvious what's going on when it wouldn't have been before."
Metro on 08/09/2015