Erik Malcolm Champion

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• PhD
• Enterprise Fellow at University of South Australia

Organic Design in Twentieth-Century Nordic Architecture presents a communicable and useful definition of organic architecture that reaches beyond constraints. The book focuses on the works and writings of architects in Nordic countries, such as Sigurd Lewerentz, Jørn Utzon, Sverre Fehn and the Aaltos (Aino, Elissa and Alvar), among others. It is st...

This book explains how designing, playing and modifying computer games, and understanding the theory behind them, can strengthen the area of digital humanities. This book aims to help digital humanities scholars understand both the issues and also advantages of game design, as well as encouraging them to extend the field of computer game studies, p...

What are the leading tools and archives in digital cultural heritage? How can they be integrated into research infrastructures to better serve their intended audiences? In this book, authors from a wide range of countries, representing some of the best research projects in digital humanities related to cultural heritage, discuss their latest findin...

This chapter begins with a quick overview of what virtual heritage is, given the information of the chapters before it. It then looks at 11 virtual heritage projects from around the world, what content they display, what interaction is enabled, and the cultural learning outcomes attempted by the projects. These projects demonstrate to me the challe...

This collection of essays explores the history, implications, and usefulness of phenomenology for the study of real and virtual places. While the influence of phenomenology on architecture and urban design has been widely acknowledged, its effect on the design of virtual places and environments has yet to be exposed to critical reflection. These es...

Although it is not often mentioned in the same breath as text, my area is virtual heritage. Simply put, it is the meeting of virtual reality and cultural heritage. In reality, most projects have been desktop-based 3D virtual environments, but more and more researchers have been exploring games and game-like environments, or phone-based applications...

This chapter explores the significance of Extended Reality (XR) to the Digital Humanities, especially in the area of digital cultural heritage, a growing and important subset of digital humanities. Cultural heritage is participatory, dynamic, discursive, and social, yet most virtual environments and serious games are not, but this is an addressable...

In these popular games you avoid, or you aim and fight, so they combine two of what Roger Colloy talked about in the four modes of games. He was an anthropologist in the 50s looking at competitive chicken sports. He said games have a sense of vertigo, competition, chance, and mimicry, but we do not have computer games which have much in the way of...

Approaches to both metadata in 3D cultural heritage and strengthening the integration of paradata have been clearly focused on developing new technological solutions. New technologies allow novel and richer communication participation yet metadata in 3D cultural heritage has been decided by a combination of specialized individuals and by frameworks...

Conference papers, articles, books, and blogs have already examined how aspects of cultural geography can be explored through video games. This paper will explain how games and game engines can be modded (modified) to allow players to explore aspects of GeoHumanities, in particular, place and presence, from a perspective aligned with a selection of...

An essay collection exploring the board game's relationship to the built environment, revealing the unexpected ways that play reflects perceptions of space. Board games harness the creation of entirely new worlds. From the medieval warlord to the modern urban planner, players are permitted to inhabit a staggering variety of roles and are prompted t...

This research project investigates the potential of 360-panorama tours to improve the situated and contextual interpretation, virtual visitation, and spatial understanding of recorded or simulated built heritage sites. Our chosen case study was the Subiaco Hotel, a significant heritage building designed by Summerhayes Architecture, which we documen...

The Australian Time Layered Cultural Map platform was created to help digital humanities scholars investigate how online geospatial tools could provide exemplars to their humanities colleagues on how historical collections and cultural data could be extended and reexamined with geospatial tools. The project discussed here investigated how Recogito/...

This chapter is an overview of evaluation studies and techniques into virtual environments in general, and those that evaluate presence in particular. It then critiques academic papers in virtual heritage over the last decade and argues that while those who design virtual heritage environments can still learn from the presence research community, t...

There is widespread confusion over the terms augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality, but there is a further term as well, augmented virtuality. A new term, Extended Reality, or XR, promises to do away with the confusion by gathering all of the terms under its umbrella label. But there is also the apparently new concept of the Metaver...

How can we increase awareness and understanding of other cultures using interactive online digital visualizations of past civilizations? In order to answer the above question, this chapter first questions the success of current virtual environments and asks whether they are capable of producing a platform that supports the experience and understand...

Creating a descriptive and to some degree prescriptive taxonomy of place and describing the confusing but vital concept of culture only takes us so far. We also need to explore game-style interaction and how virtual environments can learn from its fundamental components in order to make them both more engaging and more educational. This chapter dis...

In the conclusion, the previous eight chapters are summarized, the three-part theory defining three types of virtual environments is returned to, and I mention some possible reasons why there has so far been little research undertaken on the relationship between interaction and cultural learning in virtual environments. For cultural presence is not...

Unfortunately, the academic communities that respectively research virtual heritage and virtual presence do not often converge. One group has tended to ignore the individual differences and experiential requirements of participants, and the other has tended to conflate culture with society. This chapter highlights problems in the research community...

From an explanation of virtual heritage and the problem of culture, this chapter provides a selective overview of games, game mods, and game-like virtual environments offering insight and potential in communicating cultural significance, affording learning about the past through immersion and engagement.KeywordsVirtual environmentCultural significa...

This chapter explores issues and consequences associated with travel and tourism. I examine the disastrous effects of tourism on sites around the world, from England to South America, the issue of air travel, and missing opportunities for learning once one reaches a heritage site. So there are possible advantages to using virtual reality technology...

This chapter deals with the key issue, of creating a meaningful sense of place. This chapter outlines limitations of the ‘cyberspace’ theorists’ notions of place and suggests how these limitations adversely affect virtual heritage environments. A fivefold description of different features of place that may be appropriate for virtual environments is...

The prospect and potential of videogame-induced tourism have only recently been discussed in academic publications. This chapter will examine three possible reasons why, provide evidence to the contrary, and suggest new developments that may accelerate the impact of videogames on tourism (and the related experiencing of affective landscapes). The m...

The explosion in the development and communication of digital humanities has seen fascinating digital visualisation projects. Some focus on slavery and massacre, such as the Monroe and Florence Work Today website, (Monroe & Florence Work Unknown), a database and mapping platform of lynching in America, Slave voyages visualized by SLADE magazine (Ka...

Chapter 9, in Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact Edited by: Robert Houghton Volume 11 in the series Video Games and the Humanities https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110712032 There is a 12 month embargo on a repository version of this chapter.

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has great potential as a teaching and learning tool. The world of Skyrim, although sometimes labelled pseudo-medieval, can aim for a level of historical accuracy comparable to many scholarly digital 3D reconstruction projects. These types of projects are now widely accepted as a vehicle for a new way of thinking about old to...

Studies in the virtual heritage (VH) domain identify collaboration (social interaction), engagement, and a contextual relationship as key elements of interaction design that influence users’ experience and cultural learning in VH applications. The purpose of this study is to validate whether collaboration (social interaction), engaging experience,...

How would the humanities change if we grappled with the ways in which digital and virtual places are designed, experienced, and critiqued? In Rethinking Virtual Places, Erik Malcolm Champion draws from the fields of computational sciences and other place-related disciplines to argue for a more central role for virtual space in the humanities. For...

In recent years, considerable efforts have been made by cultural heritage institutions across the globe to digitise cultural heritage sites, artifacts, historical maps, etc. for digital preservation and online representation. On the other hand, ample research projects and studies have been published that demonstrate the great capabilities of web-ge...

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage...

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage...

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage...

This paper discusses a simplified workflow and interactive learning opportunities for exporting map and location data using a free tool, Recogito into a Unity game environment with a simple virtual museum room template. The aim was to create simple interactive virtual museums for humanities scholars and students with a minimum of programming or gam...

Before colonization, there were over 250 languages spoken in Australia. Today only thirteen Indigenous languages are still being taught to children). Language has an important part to play in cultural maintenance and ‘closing the gap’ in terms of First Peoples’ cultural heritage, identity, and sense of belonging. In this work, we aim to develop an...

Cultural presence is a term used to explain and evaluate cultural learning in virtual heritage projects but is less frequently used for video games. Given the increasing importance of video games to cultural heritage, this article investigates explanations of cultural presence that could be communicated by games, especially concerning UNESCO and IC...

A storyteller panorama tour, The Story of the Markam Car Collection, was developed as an example for museums and cultural institutions concerning the use of panoramas combined with multimedia to tell stories of specific large objects (antique cars). It was designed for multiple platforms to involve and engage audiences via large curved screens whil...

Recently, many Resource Description Framework (RDF) data generation tools have been developed to convert geospatial and non-geospatial data into RDF data. Furthermore, there are several interlinking frameworks that find semantically equivalent geospatial resources in related RDF data sources. However, many existing Linked Open Data sources are curr...

p class="VARAbstract">Despite the increasing number of three-dimensional (3D) model portals and online repositories catering for digital heritage scholars, students and interested members of the general public, there are very few recent academic publications that offer a critical analysis when reviewing the relative potential of these portals and o...

The video game industry is a profitable one. Juniper Research predicted that worldwide it would pass $100 billion in revenue in 2017 (Graham 2017). In recent years, there has been increasing synergies between video games and virtual reality, thanks to increasingly powerful computers and the development of consumer-priced head-mounted displays (HMDs...

This paper reports on an Australian project that is developing an online system to deliver researcher-driven national-scale infrastructure for the humanities, focused on mapping, time series, and data integration. Australian scholars and scholars of Australia worldwide are well served with digital resources and tools to deepen the understanding of...

Traditionally, art history has been viewed as a concern about the context of creation, curation, critique, and classification of art, but its range and focus is seldom agreed on. A conventional view of art history may suggest that, as a field, it is dedicated to issues of classification and the development of related expertise in curation and criti...

One of the many but important dilemmas we may encounter in designing or critiquing games for archaeology (Champion 2015) is determining the why: why we should develop, buy, play, and teach specific games for the above disciplines. For archaeology, I propose there is a further important trifurcation: games aiming to convey an experience of arch aeol...

This paper reports on an Australian project that is developing an online system to deliver researcher-driven national-scale infrastructure for the humanities, focused on mapping, time series, and data integration. Australian scholars and scholars of Australia worldwide are well served with digital resources and tools to deepen the understanding of...

4th Boao International Tourism Communication Forum (ITCF), Hainan China, 23-24 November 2019

This chapter analyses the gap between digital historical models, and proposes that instead of developing stand-alone models that we design in terms of components, components of scholarly ecosystems and audience-oriented learning systems. The focus here is not on individual projects or technological limitations but on the lack of clear and replicabl...

In recent years, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Virtuality (AV), and Mixed Reality (MxR) have become popular immersive reality technologies for cultural knowledge dissemination in Virtual Heritage (VH). These technologies have been utilised for enriching museums with a personalised visiting experience and digital content ta...

The 3D reconstruction of real-world heritage objects using either a laser scanner or 3D modelling software is typically expensive and requires a high level of expertise. Image-based 3D modelling software, on the other hand, offers a cheaper alternative, which can handle this task with relative ease. There also exists free and open source (FOSS) sof...

The amount of digital cultural heritage data produced by cultural heritage institutions is growing rapidly. Digital cultural heritage repositories have therefore become an efficient and effective way to disseminate and exploit digital cultural heritage data. However, many digital cultural heritage repositories worldwide share technical challenges s...

The domain of cultural heritage is on the verge of adopting immersive technologies; not only to enhance user experience and interpretation but also to satisfy the more enthusiastic and tech-savvy visitors and audiences. However, contemporary academic discourse seldom provides any clearly defined and versatile workflows for digitising 3D assets from...

If virtual heritage is the application of virtual reality to cultural heritage, then one might assume that virtual heritage (and 3D digital heritage in general) successfully communicates the need to preserve the cultural significance of physical artefacts and intangible heritage. However, digital heritage models are seldom seen outside of conferenc...

The primary objective of this paper is to present a redefinition of Mixed Reality from a perspective emphasizing the relationship between users, virtuality and reality as a fundamental component. The redefinition is motivated by three primary reasons. Firstly, current literature in which Augmented Reality is the focus appears to approach Augmented...

To validate the hypothesis that virtual heritage papers are reliant on providing scholarly argumentation based on 3D models, and convenient access is provided to these models where relevant, this study reviewed 264 articles from the last three available proceedings of major digital heritage events and conferences (14 in total). The findings reveale...

In this article, we share our experiences of using digital technologies and various media to present historical narratives of a museum object collection aiming to provide an engaging experience on multiple platforms. Based on P. Joseph’s article, Dawson presented multiple interpretations and historical views of the Markham car collection across var...

for UNESCO Chair of Cultural Heritage and Visualisation

This collection of essays explores the history, implications, and usefulness of phenomenology for the study of real and virtual places. While the influence of phenomenology on architecture and urban design has been widely acknowledged, its effect on the design of virtual places and environments has yet to be exposed to critical reflection. These es...

In this chapter I will put forward five important questions arising from the major writings of Norwegian architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000) regarding his discussion of place as dwelling. These key aspects are: his conflation of dwelling with place; simplifying to a poetical but confusing extreme the concept of region; his a...

Makerspaces make a unique contribution to the partnership between academic libraries and digital humanities by providing a creative, informal space for learning skills and new knowledge, sharing materials and equipment, and exploring and experimenting through an problem-solving, inquiry-based learning approach. The concept of the makerspace as a "l...

300) In 1986, a group of Spanish architects decided to physically recreate an icon of modernist architecture. Mies van der Rohe's German pavilion for the Barcelona World Expo of 1929 was at the cutting edge of spatial and structural innovation but its influence was limited to what we understand through drawings, photographs, limited film footage an...

The success of virtual heritage projects, through the careful inspection, contextualization and modification of 3D digital heritage models with virtual reality technology, is still problematic. Models are hard to find, impossible to download and edit, in unusual, unwieldy or obsolete formats. Many of the freely available models are stand-alone 3D m...

Digital Humanities might appear a recent phenomenon. Yet almost seventy years have gone by since Father Roberto Busa initiated his Digital Humanities project: the computer-assisted lemmatization of the complete Thomistic corpus (http://www.corpusthomisti-cum.org/). Although Busa first conceived of this project in 1946, it took him nearly four decad...

Wandering around museums or visiting art galleries and school fairs, a relatively impartial observer might notice the paucity of interactive historical exhibitions. In particular there is still a yawning chasm between serious games masquerading as entertainment and the aims and motivations of archaeology. Surely this is resolved by virtual heritage...

Resumen: ¿Cómo podemos transmitir los valores e interpretaciones del patrimonio cultural aplicando la realidad virtual a bajo costo, de una manera apropiada en términos contextuales y que resulte educacional­ mente efectiva y colaborativa? Aunque se han llevado a cabo excelentes investigaciones sobre la presencia social en entornos virtuales (Swint...

Roles and rituals are essential for creating, situating and maintaining cultural practices. Computer Role-Playing games (CRPGs) and virtual online worlds that appear to simulate different cultures are well known and highly popular. So it might appear that the roles and rituals of traditional cultures are easily ported to computer games. However, I...

This article examines the question of whether Digital Humanities has given too much focus to text over non-text media and provides four major reasons to encourage more non-text-focused research under the umbrella of Digital Humanities. How could Digital Humanities engage in more humanities-oriented rhetorical and critical visualization, and not onl...

Serious games are digital games and simulations designed for specific purposes beyond pure entertainment. Serious purposes are, for example, raising awareness about environmental and social issues, persuading gamers to change their lives or the lives of others through social innovation, or games for learning, training and education. However, enterta...

While many education institutes use Skype, Google Chat or other commercial video-conferencing applications, these applications are not suitable for presenting architectural or urban design or archaeological information, as they don't integrate the presenter with interactive 3D media. Nor do they allow spatial or component-based interaction controll...

This theoretical position paper outlines four key issues blocking the development of effective 3D models that would be suitable for the aims and objectives of virtual heritage infrastructures. It suggests that a real-time game environment which composes levels at runtime from streaming multimédia components would offer advantages in terms of editin...

This paper will propose and address issues that contribute to a serious challenge for virtual heritage: that there are few successful, accessible and durable examples of computer game technology and genres applied to heritage. Secondly, it will argue that the true potential of computers for heritage has not been fully lever-aged and it will provide...

This article summarizes past definitions of entertainment, serious games and virtual heritage in order to discuss whether virtual heritage has particular problems not directly addressed by conventional serious games. For virtual heritage, typical game-style entertainment poses particular ethical problems, especially around the simulation of histori...

This paper critiques essential features in prominent theories of serious games, and compares them to interaction features of commercial computer games that could be used for history and heritage-based learning in order to develop heuristics that may help future the specific requirements of serious game design for interactive history and digital her...

This article describes the primary ways in which intelligent agents have been employed in virtual heritage projects and explains how the special requirements of virtual heritage environments necessitate the development of cultural agents. How do we distinguish between social agents and cultural agents? Can cultural agents meet these specific herita...

Despite originating as practical aides for the design of real-world architecture, Computer-Aided Design and Draughting (CADD) software tools initially encountered a great deal of resistance, in part because of their initial expense and apparent technical complexity, but also because they were seen as blunt tools, crude instrumentation inadequate fo...

Roles and rituals are essential for creating, situating and maintaining cultural practices. Computer Role-Playing games (CRPGs) and virtual online worlds that appear to simulate different cultures are well known and highly popular. So it might appear that the roles and rituals of traditional cultures are easily ported to computer games. However, I...

In 2007 China began to host science fiction conferences. An invited speaker, the British writer Neil Garmin (2013), said their reasoning was to encourage innovation. So the Chinese visited Apple, Microsoft and Google to discover that the forward-looking and innovative workers at these companies credited science fiction with helping their imaginatio...

Linked Open Data provides a means of unified access to large and complex interconnected data sets that concern themselves with a surprising breath and depth of topics. This unified access in turn allows for the consumption of this data for modelling cultural heritage sites, historical events or creating serious games. In the following paper we pres...

The serious games community rightly argues that there’s more to serious games than entertainment, and restricting the focus to entertainment “seriously undersells its potential” (Jenkins 2006). Indeed, while a consensus definition of serious games still eludes us, serious games are often described as games designed for a primary purpose other than...

Can recent technology help bridge cultures through playful interaction appropriate to traditional tacit means of acquiring knowledge? In order to help answer this question, we designed four Adobe Flash-based based game prototypes and evaluated them via a touch-screen PC. The goal was to offer nonChinese participants a playful way of experiencing as...

This case study evaluated the effect on cultural understanding of three different interaction modes, each teamed with a specific slice of the digitally reconstructed environment. The three interaction modes were derived from an initial descriptive theory of cultural learning as instruction, observation and action. A major aim was to ascertain wheth...

This paper surveys current notions of social and cultural presence as they may help the evaluation of cultural heritage projects. We argue that cultural heritage requires specialized evaluation, as key issues both connect and separate the aims of presence researchers and cultural heritage experts. To support this argument, three case studies of vir...

As game studies has emerged from the shadows of the computer lab, a pitched battle has developed amongst the ludologists and the narratologists, the systematizers and the emergent game play aficionados, and between die-hard players and keen young scouts from media studies. Some fans have raised the suggestion that games could contain elements of ar...

Are games worthy of academic attention? Can they be used effectively in the classroom, in the research laboratory, as an innovative design tool, as a persuasive political weapon? Game Mods: Design Theory and Criticism aims to answer these and more questions. It features chapters by authors chosen from around the world, representing fields as divers...

This paper explains potential benefits of indirect biofeedback used within interactive virtual environments, and reflects on an earlier study that allowed for the dynamic modification of a virtual environment's graphic shaders, music and artificial intelligence, based on the biofeedback of the player. The aim was to determine which augmented effect...