Motion in Place: a Case Study of Archaeological Reconstruction Using Motion Capture

Human movement constitutes a fundamental part of the archaeological process, and of any interpretation of a site’s usage; yet there has to date been little or no consideration of how movement observed (in contemporary situations) and inferred (in archaeological reconstruction) can be documented. This paper reports on the Motion in Place Platform project, which seeks to use motion capture hardware and data to test human responses to Virtual Reality (VR) environments and their real-world equivalents using round houses of the Southern British Iron Age which have been both modelled in 3D and reconstructed in the present day as a case study. This allows us to frame questions about the assumptions which are implicitly hardwired into VR presentations of archaeology and cultural heritage in new ways. In the future, this will lead to new insights into how VR models can be constructed, used and transmitted.