The use of the term "virtual" is commonly associated with the idea of an extension of reality. Similarly, the expression "virtual museum" is usually adopted to mean a process of duplication of a physical museum and its objects that is enabled by information technologies. Therefore, "virtual museum" has become a useful synonym for multimedia products and websites capable of providing new and fre...

This paper presents user interaction modules of a recent digital cultural heritage conservation and exploration project concerning two important museums: Istanbul Archeology Museum and the Museum of Dolmabahçe Palace Collections in Istanbul. The project aims at enriching the visitor experience through modern digital technologies. Main modules include 3D scanning of the artifacts, information sc...

The cumulative nature of human culture is unique in the animal kingdom. Progressive improvements in tools and technologies have facilitated humanity's spread across the globe and shaped human evolution, but the cognitive mechanisms enabling cultural change remain unclear. Here we show that, contrary to theoretical predictions, cumulative improvements in tools are not dependent on specialised, h...

That human evolution amalgamates biological and cultural change is taken as a given, and that the interaction of brain, body, and culture is more reciprocal then initially thought becomes apparent as the science of evolution evolves (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005). The contribution of science and technology to this evolutionary process is probably the first to come to mind. The biology of Homo sapien...

This paper is meant as a basis for discussion towards a framework for cog-nitive architectures integrating remembering, rehearsal, language and empathy. It describes the programmatic background of our concrete work on intelligent autonomous agents. The goal is to motivate a common framework which should inspire research onàrtiicial cognition' for autonomous robots as well as investigations on c...

Image-based rendering (IBR) is an emerging and promising technology for photo-realistic rendering of scenes and objects from a collection of densely sampled images and videos. This paper proposes an image-based approach to the rendering and multi-view display of ancient Chinese artifacts for cultural heritage preservation. A multiple-camera circular array was constructed to record images of the...

Image-based rendering (IBR) is an emerging and promising technology for photo-realistic rendering of scenes and objects from a collection of densely sampled images and videos. This paper proposes an image-based approach to the rendering and multi-view display of ancient Chinese artifacts for cultural heritage preservation. A multiple-camera circular array was constructed to record images of the...

Beginning with Edward Tylor’s (1889) definition of culture as socially “acquired,” I focus in this article on motion as social acquisition and transmission through “artifacts”—both durable (like ceramic pots) and fleeting (like sounds). Motion can be detected by comparison of the artifacts to which people are exposed with those they in turn produce. I examine rates of interaction with artifacts...

Scientists studying how languages change over time often make an analogy between biological and cultural evolution, with words or grammars behaving like traits subject to natural selection. Recent work has exploited this analogy by using models of biological evolution to explain the properties of languages and other cultural artefacts. However, the mechanisms of biological and cultural evolutio...

This paper elaborates on scenarios for collaborative knowledge creation in the spirit of the trialogical learning paradigm. According to these scenarios the group knowledge base is formed by combining the knowledge bases of the participants according to various methods. The provision of flexible methods for defining various aspects of the group knowledge is expected to enhance synergy in the kn...