Keynote Speech

Title: VR/AR for Revitalizing Cultural Heritage

Abstract :

Due to the progress of new technologies, the price of high-quality head-mounted displays (HMDs) has recently dropped to a new low level which dramatically accelerates the research and development in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). With the affordable VR/AR equipment, we have tried a few possibilities to apply the VR/AR technologies to revitalize cultural heritage. There are two kinds of cultural heritage, tangible and intangible. Tangible cultural heritage includes historic buildings, monuments, and artifacts, while the intangible cultural heritage includesperforming arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe. For the tangible cultural heritage, I shall introduce two of our recent VR works, “Flying Spirit in Dunhuang” and “Autumn Colors of National Palace Museum”. For the “Flying Spirit in Dunhuang”, we allow the users to explore Mogao Cave #61 as if they are the spirits living in the cave, and can “fly” (or more precisely, jump-and-slide) in the cave freely without the constraints of space and time. For example, they can travel to the past and see the 3D reconstruction of the missing statues which were originally placed on the central altar. They can also see the digitally restored mural details which can now hardly be seen clearly by the naked eye. Moreover, the users are allowed to jump up to the ceiling and stay in mid-air, and then observe carefully the decorative pattern of the "zaojing" (caisson) , which is not possible even when one physically visits the cave. For the VR work of “Autumn Colors of National Palace Museum”, we let the users virtually walk into a famous Chinese painting and feel immersed in the inner world of Chinese Literati. The famous painting, “Autumn in Que and Hua Mountains”, was painted by Mengfu Zhao about seven hundred years ago, and is now preserved in the National Palace Museum. As for the intangible cultural heritage, we have developed an AR tool “Augmented-Learning of TaiChi” using Microsoft Hololens, to alleviate the difficulties in learning TaiChi-Chuan. Our hope is that, with this new AR tool, more young people can be attracted to learn this great heritage, and consequently improve their own lives through practicing Tai-Chi-Chuan regularly.

Biographical Sketch：

Dr. Yi-Ping Hung received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the National Taiwan University in 1982, and his Ph.D. degree from Brown University in 1990. He is currently the Dean of Research and Development in Tainan National University of the Arts, and is also a professor in the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, and in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, at the National Taiwan University. From 1990 to 2002, he was with the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, where he received the Young Researcher Publication Award, and became a tenured research fellow in 1997. He has served as a deputy director of the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, and the director of the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University. Professor Hung is the founding president of the TaiCHI (Taiwan Association of Computer-Human Intertaction), and has served as the program co-chairs of ACCV’00, ICAT’00, ACPR’13, the workshop co-chair for ICCV’03, and the general chair of ACCV’16. He has served in the editorial board of the International Journal of Computer Vision since 2004, and is also an associate editor of the Journal of Information Science and Engineering. He was the keynote speaker for PSIVT’07, DeSForM’09, ACE’10, CVGIP’15, IWAIT’16 and PNC’16. His interactive artworks have been exhibited in Taiwan, Brazil, Spain, Austria, Denmark, and France. His current research interests include human-computer interaction, computer vision, virtual reality, augmented reality, multimedia system, pattern recognition, and image processing.