By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Arts & Features Editor On Oct. 25, the Center for Digital Humanities hosted “The Crossroads Virtual Museum: Exhibition, Research, and Education.” This workshop is likely the last installment in the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) invited lecture series because the grant concludes in January, according to Bartholomew Brinkman, the director of the Center for Digital Humanities. When he first thought of the series, he had wanted to have a healthy mix of formal lectures and hands-on workshops, he said. Throughout this semester, this is the first workshop they have hosted. He introduced Misha Elashvili and Polina Sabinin, professors from Bridgewater State University (BSU). Elashvili said their aim is to share some of their experiences and research, which is collaborative work between Bridgewater State University and the Republic of Georgia’s Ilia State University (ISU), where he is from. One of the projects they’re working on is the Crossroads Virtual Museum - Bringing Cultural Heritage Protection to Classrooms, funded by the U.S. Embassy of Georgia, he said. Sabinin likes to include students in the work their researchers and faculty do. “That’s the most authentic way to have you guys experience research, and what it looks like and what it feels like,” she said. It also “brings a level of authenticity and a level of excitement to all the projects,” she added. One goal they maintain is keeping a diverse group of participants and partners in their work, including “undergraduate students, but also graduate students and faculty, new faculty, and seasoned faculty,” Sabinin said. They also have many different disciplines involved in the research, such as archeology, ecology, biology, and more, she added. Elashvili has experience ranging from physics to geology. Starting from one U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project, their research team has taken on several new projects, she said. Only some of them get funded, but they try to complete the unfunded tasks as well. She discussed the SIMuR project. “So SIMuR stands for Shiraki International Multi-disciplinary undergraduate Research projects. It’s funded by NSF,” Sabinin said. Shiraki is a high elevation plateau in the southeastern most corner of Georgia, and is “a site of an ancient civilization… and dramatically changing environmental conditions,” she explained. They investigate what happened to the civilization, what is happening to the environment, and any possible connections between the two, she said. BSU, ISU, and the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) were all involved in this project, as well as researchers from several other countries, she added. Depending on the year, they would have BSU students travel to Georgia to do field work, Sabinin said. But the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine shut that down. “So we brought Georgian collaborators, graduate students as well as faculty, to us, into our labs,” she said. Elashvili said they use virtual reality to create a virtual reconstruction of archeological artifacts and environments. To create the virtual reconstruction, they take photos of the same object from many different directions, he said. “And then the rest is done by the special algorithm, which finds the common points between the photos,” he added. The quality is comparable to using laser scanning, except with a much cheaper price. “But it’s not just the price. You can use this everywhere. … The pros are way larger than the cons,” Elashvili said. This can be done through drones, which is how they get scans of areas that someone would otherwise need special permission and equipment to access, he said. An entire village from the Bronze Age was virtually reconstructed. They needed input from the historians and archeologists working on the excavation site of the real village, he added. The pottery shown in the reconstruction’s kitchens are 3D models of pottery excavated from graves, he said. “Sorry, not from the kitchen. We took it from the graves, but it’s the same stuff, right?” he joked. Five years ago, using VR headsets with their applications would require a cable wire connection to the actual workstation, Elashvili said. Now it’s wireless and doesn’t need as many stations, making the technology more affordable and comfortable. Next, he discussed a virtual reconstruction of a cathedral from the Medieval period. On the walls are small texts and inscriptions, he said. “Today, people also do the same thing, and that’s not considered to be nice, right? But people were always doing the same thing,” Elashvili said. The inscriptions sometimes gave insight into the reality of the time period, similar to newspapers, he said. “They’re mentioning some names of people, they’re mentioning some important events of that period.” Because they use photos to make these VR reconstructions, they frequently need to rely on sunlight, he added. But because the position of the sun changes, different features are visible at different times of the day. Virtual museums can use this technology to create reconstructions of different historical environments, with animals and even people, he said. Elashvili said they could include in the museum “the entire cave of the Paleolithic period, and you can even make it habitable - you can put a fire in that cave.” They’re working on a virtual reality museum in Georgia, which uses holographic projection, he said. Using the projection, they can create a hard-to-detect transparent holographic screen, he added. A member of the audience asked if VR technology could help conservation efforts by creating motivation to conserve the space and encouraging people to visit historical and environmental sites digitally instead of actually going there. Elashvili said it can by bringing awareness to these situations. “No matter how many videos you will shoot or how many articles you type in, it’s way more informative when you can experience it using virtual reality,” he said. VR is also a good research tool for collecting data, he said. “It’s not just documentation and conservation, but it’s a baseline data for research, and that’s what we are doing now,” he added. After visiting the University of California San Diego, Elashvili saw they have a cyber-archaeology center where “they are doing really fancy stuff,” he said. When comparing East Coast and West Coast in developing this technology in education, he got the impression “they are a little bit ahead. Not much but a little bit ahead,” he added. UC San Diego has a spherical room covered in screens in their cyber center, Elashvili said. “Once you put on your stereo glasses, you get absolute sense of this reality. You can’t even call it virtual reality, it’s real,” he added. Elashvili put on a headset and connected it to the presentation screen, allowing the audience to view the virtual reality he was seeing. Walking in the real world moved the avatar, but simply clicking at a certain spot moved the viewer there instantly. He showed the audience the Bronze Age village and Medieval cathedral reconstructions. At the end of the discussion, attendees were invited to try on the headsets and walk around some of the virtual reconstructions.