“The first thing that most visitors notice when they arrive at the Vijayanagara site is the remarkable scenery. The village of Hampi, the ruins of Vijayanagara and the green, irrigated fields that surround it are set in a wilderness of extraordinary beauty. Granite boulders of varying tones of grey, ochre and pink dominate the landscape, distributed either as long ridges or hills or of piles of rock that seem to have been thrown down by some primeval cataclysm” (excerpt from http://www.vijayanagara.org)
Virupaksha Temple, Hampi. © Kenderdine, 2006PLACE-Hampi is a work of high resolution stereographic panoramas augmented with computer graphic characters—for embodied participation in the cultural landscape of Vijayanagara (Hampi), South India. The work is propelled by a vision to create hermeneutically enriched and phenomenologically responsive cultural heritage landscapes using unique virtual environment technologies and tools for the stereographic capture of landscape and the ambisonic capture of sound. My research in applied virtual heritage for the last few years has focused on the capture of aural and visual fidelity and rendering these experiences to allow both presence and co-presence in the conjoined real and augmented virtual scenes of world heritage sites. I see that stereographic panoramas and ambisonics are powerful and persuasive aids to bring landscape to life.
I have a background as a practising maritime archaeologist and in the phenomenology of religion, and a work such as Place-Hampi is synchronous to these interests and my current research in virtual environments developments. This work is just one of many that can be told about Hampi as an historical, archaeological and sacred place and in this way it acts as a demonstrator for future trajectories in interpretive heritage. The following article contains a description focused principally on Place-Hampi Stage 1, while Stage 2 will involve several more years of research; also included below are the theoretical foundation of the work; and how it was implemented (technologies et al).
A group of talented people from Australia and India (most especially co-authors Jeffrey Shaw, John Gollings, Paul Doornbusch) made this work possible. Key advisors and participants have over 25 years of archaeological and photographic experience there. Hampi is an extraordinary place, and the team has an enduring relationship with the people there that help us and with the powerful and animate landscape.
Description of the installation
PLACE-Hampi (Stage 1) is a vibrant theatre for embodied participation in the drama of Hindu mythology set into a real-world landscape. PLACE-Hampi provides the setting for a stereographic virtual landscape populated by seventeen cylinders enclosing a constellation of cinematic events in which the audience can participate, traverse and examine at will. It is a modular interactive cinema where three kinds of narrative spaces are conjoined: The cylinders comprise augmented high resolution stereoscopic panoramas that present the most significant archaeological, historical, and sacred locations at the site of the World Heritage of Vijayanagara (Hampi) in southern India.
PLACE-Hampi (Stage 1 implementation): Ganesha animation composited in panoramic scene, PLACE interactive platform. © Kenderdine & Shaw, 2006
Krishna Tank, Hampi: mono view of stereo pair. © Gollings, Kenderdine & Shaw 2006DOWNLOAD QTVR 1
Vitthala Temple, Hampi: mono view of stereo pair. © Gollings, Kenderdine & Shaw, 2006DOWNLOAD QTVR 2
Embedded within this rich scenery are lively narrative events enacted by computer graphic characters based on the mythologies specific to the site (from Karnataka localisation of the Hindu epics specifically the Ramayana and, local cult deities) that have been composited into the three dimensional (3D) landscapes. The scripted narrative animations are latent events that come to life when the operator of the interface focuses attention on particular features within the panoramic scene. The animations are based on the aesthetic of “magical realism” specific to the region.
One frame from the rendered panoramic movie. Ganesha on Hemakuta Hill. © Kenderdine & Shaw, 2006DOWNLOAD QTVR 3 with animation of Ganesha
The panoramic cylinders (17) are accurately positioned on a 1880s map of the site overlain with a 3D model of the archaeological landscape. The user interface’s screen shows a bird’s-eye view of this virtual environment, centred on the viewer’s changing location there.
PLACE-Hampi, perspective as a participant navigates the virtual 3D landscape embedded with stereoscopic panoramic cylinders. © Kenderdine & Shaw, 2006The visual landscape is contained within a spatial aural field (the third space) made from decoded ambisonic 360-degree recordings enlivened by classical Carnatic compositions and played back in real-time with the audience’s activities. This dynamic interactive rendering and delivery system uses sophisticated mapping and transformation strategies, as the user controls and navigates the space, to deliver a synergic sonic experience which is intimately connected with the visually panoramic and augmented space. This articulates an unprecedented level of viewer co-presence in the narrative exploration of a virtual cultural landscape.
PLACE-Hampi provides a framework for a new approach to the rendering of the cultural experience, whose aesthetic and representational features gives the general public a dramatic new appreciation of the many layered significations of such historical, archaeological, and architectural spaces. While PLACE-Hampi embodies a single user interaction model, the autonomous narrative scenarios that populate each of the panoramic scenes with mythological significance become endowed with the emergent narrative relations that are generated by each viewer's interactive exploration of this virtual environment which are also available to the total audience simultaneously present (maximum 30 people). The work, as defined above, is considered at the forefront of international developments of virtual environments and the complex arrangement of technical and aesthetic parameters that are required to develop them.
Stage 1 PLACE-Hampi will first be launched for Lille 3000, in the Opera House, Lille, France (October 14th 2006 – January 14th 2007). Stage 2 PLACE-Hampi will be completed in 2008 for exhibition at Museum Victoria and involves rendering the work in Advanced Visualization Interactive Environment at iCinema , as an augmented landscape with computer generated characters who have autonomous agency, the culmination of research into co-evolutionary narrative where computer agents have the ability to observe and interpret the visitor behaviours within the exhibition space
PLACE-Hampi Stage 2, implementation in AVIE. Visualization © iCinema Centre, UNSW, 2006Feildwork and capture technologies:
We undertook the fieldwork data capture over an 8 day and subsequent 10 day period in the first four months in 2006. The team consisted of myself, John Gollings (photographer with a 25 year history of photography at the site (culminating in, among other projects, an extraordinary book visually tracing the photography of Alexander J Greenlaw in 1856, see also ) and, Prof Jeffrey Shaw of iCinema. The stereo panoramic photography was shot onto 220 film Fujichrome ASTIA using the stereo VR Roundshot camera by Seitz (Nikon 35mm and 20mm lenses used in this instance, see for technical details), a wonderful way to capture high resolution, with all the images drummed scanned and cropped for the rendering. 
Roundshot VR stereo camera rig and ambisonic recording microphone insitu. © Kenderdine & Shaw 2006Doron Kipen and Paul Doornbusch undertook ambisonic sound recording and we work closely with the archaeologists Drs John Fritz and George Mitchell, and local director of the Save Hampi Trust, Surendra Kumar, and all work was with permissions from the Archaeological Survey of India. The compositional materials were supplied by Dr L. Subramanim, premier Indian classical violinist from Karnataka.
Ninety second animations of the gods Durga, Sita, Shiva, Ganesha, Garuda enacting various vignettes scenes of the Ramayana epic were composited in seven of the panoramas. For the animations we worked with Bangalore based company Paprikaas Animation Studio whose superb artists were able to provide the correct aesthetic fidelity for the imagery in the tradition of “magical realism”. For accurate interpretation motion capture of a classical India dancer was used to provide accurate data and motion for the dance of Shiva as Nataraja.
Motion Capture in progress, Lingalayam Dance Company, Artistic Director/Choreographer: Anandavalli, Dancer: Saipriya Balasubramaniam.
Shiva animation insitu. © Kenderdine & Shaw 2006
Motion Capture in progress, Lingalayam Dance Company, Artistic Director/Choreographer: Anandavalli, Dancer: Saipriya Balasubramaniam.
Shiva animation insitu. © Kenderdine & Shaw 2006The latter period was set to coincide with a festival of the marriage of Shiva and Pavarti (which we captured in HD on a Sony HVR-Z1E) which involves many pilgrims hauling two 28 foot chariots the length of the Hampi bazaar.
Over 200 panoramas were shot at Hampi, of which 53 were selected as “immaculate shots”, and 17 used in the PLACE-HAMPI installation. Image based modelling techniques can be used to derive the geometry of the scene from the stereo pairs in which the animations were composited. While the resolution of each panorama can be almost infinite, we are currently rendering each frame of the panoramic movies at 8192 x 1024.
The stereo pair of projectors used for PLACE-Hampi Stage 1 are Projection Design F2SX+ DLP projectors fitted with wide angle lenses and polarizing filters. PLACE-Hampi uses an 8.1 channel interactive surround sound installation for decoded ambisonic 360-degree soundscapes.
Theoretical Background: communities of interaction in a cultural landscape
PLACE-Hampi is highly significant for promoting dialogues of engagement with the imagery of a cultural landscape and activating the embedded knowledge contained there. Hampi today continues to be an active pilgrim site, not simply an historic and touristic place. Each day its landscape and temples are activated through various rituals and tapas specific to time, place and to discrete locations in the complex. As part of a living tradition, the interpretation of the site by pilgrims is in a constant state of re-definition within the broad tenants of (south Indian, Karnataka tradition) Hinduism. A conversation takes place between mythological characters and the sacred objects/sites/natural features permeated with the contemporary “folkloric imagination” of the pilgrims.2
Pilgrims at Virupaksha Temple, Hampi. © Kenderdine 2005Hindi priests and pilgrims are not the only ones to enliven these Hindu images and temples. Bringing with them different religious assumptions, political agendas and economic motivations, others may animate the same objects or sovereignty as polytheistic “idols”, as “devils” as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, as archaeological and historical relics. As Davies points out “the location of an object plays a constitutive role in the act of looking” and appropriation, relocation and redisplay of an object will dramatically alter its significance for new audiences. The frame of reference designates the historically grounded and socially shared understandings of systems3. PLACE-Hampi reconstitutes the landscape for these interpretations of mythological narratives in the form of co-presence, enabling a new mode of interpretation accessible for diverse cultural audiences.
Hampi images, festival cow; Hanuman sculpture; magicians; workers at the archaeological site. © Kenderdine 2006Virtual Heritage applications:
PLACE-Hampi both extends and vividly improves upon an earlier work I undertook at Angkor, Cambodia in high resolution stereographic panoramas. This 50 minute run time shows currently in The Virtual Room, Museum Victoria , an eight sided stereo octant around which participants circumambulate. Sacred Angkor was an experiment for me to create a work of this length (not the usual Museum timescale for a single exhibit) however the rich and contemplative nature of the visual and aural renders has ensured the consistent and vibrant enthusiasm for the work, and convinced us that . The photography was undertaken by Peter Murphy who appears on the pages of VR MAG. Robert Roberts, “Landscape Archaeology” in Landscape and Culture: Geographical and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. J. M. Wagstaff (Oxford, Blackwell, 1987): 83.
2 Nancy Adajania, Kapital and Karma, eds. Kunsthalle Wien, Angelika Fitz, 2002, p. 47.
3 Davis, R. H. 1997, Lives of Indian Images. Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Acknowledgements
PLACE-Hampi
Co-produced by: Lille3000, EPIDEMIC, UNSW iCinema Centre, Museum
Victoria, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Australian Centre for the Moving Image,
Gollings Photography, Music and Effects.
Authors: Sarah Kenderdine, Jeffrey Shaw
with John Gollings, Paul Doornbusch, Paprikaas Animation Studio and Dr L Subramaniam.
See also http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_hampi.html
About the author:
Sarah Kenderdine is by training a maritime archaeologist and museum curator, and has published a number of books on shipwrecks. Since 1994 Miss Kenderdine has developed portal websites and designed digital environments for cultural organizations throughout Southeast Asia. Ms. Kenderdine is Coordinator of Special Projects and Project Manager for The Virtual Room at Museum Victoria, and representative of VROOMCO Pty Ltd. In this role she directs and produces are number of 8 screen high resolution stereographic vr exhibitions. She is a Director for the Virtual Heritage Network, and International Society of Virtual System and Multimedia. Her current research focus involves the use of augmented real-world stereographic panoramas for heritage-based interpretation and, engaging hermeneutics and phenomenology for participant engagement in virtual systems and, new forms of narrative (e.g. “co-evolutionary narrative”) and aspects of "presence" in virtual heritage environments. She is currently publishing a book with MIT Press on the theoretical aspects of digital cultural heritage.
