EEC Grant for John Bintliff and Hans Kamermans
Prof. John Bintliff and Dr. Hans Kamermans have been awarded a 4-year EEC grant to develop Enhanced Reality reconstructions in Classical Archaeology.
The goal of this project is to help professionals analyse and understand datasets. The CEEDs (Collective Experience of Empathic Data Systems) project is partly funded by a €6.5m grant from the European Union as part of the FP7 Information and Communication Technologies programme, and involves 16 partners from university departments and companies around Europe. It incorporates basic research, technology development, and trials of its systems.
The research project has a number of aims including understanding user experience in real, mixed and virtual spaces, and its relation to presence and consciousness. Those working on the project will analyse data from new wearable and fixed sensor and brain machine interfaces to identify pre-conscious, implicit, responses to large data sets. These responses will influence what aspects of the data are presented to users of the system.
To enable users to experience historical events, CEEDs will develop an application that will optimise the acquisition, storage and presentation of data that represents key aspects of historical and emotionally impactful events, including their archaeological, social, cultural, and psychological features. The objective here is to develop interactive narrative structures that allow novice users to understand the importance of events, to identify with people involved at the time and to assign meaning with respect to their own existence.
The grant will support a research project to reconstruct ancient cities in the Leiden Ancient Cities of Boeotia Project, to be carried out by project specialist Chiara Piccoli.
Chiara Piccoli will be the key researcher employed by CEEDS to apply the EU Programme’s concepts and technologies in the handling of the immense databases of pottery and other finds recorded across three ancient city surfaces in Greece. She will also link these finds to reconstructions of the cities or academic and heritage presentations.