ITR/SY+AP: Acquisition, Representation, and Remote Visualization of Digital Artifacts

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The goal of this project is to research and develop high-quality, scalable, and reconfigurable acquisitionand display systems for digital library collections accessed via the Internet. We will acquire new digitalcollections at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico and provide access to them through end-user displaysthat are scalable and reconfigurable. These displays will cooperate with a remote model server toprovide the highest possible display fidelity under the current network conditions. In order to allowthe widespread acquisition and dissemination of digital collections, revolutionary advances in 3D modelacquistion, content delivery, and display are required. To thisend,we will focus on the following researchchallenges: Acquisition: we willprovide new acquisition strategies designed to produce high-quality layered,image-based representations, 3-D shape descriptions, and multi-layerd data. These new strategieswill enable efficient access and high-resolution end-user display. hybrid representation of texture,shape, and metadata. Representation: we will encode the acquired collection in a way that moves toward the featuresprovided in the MPEG-4 multimedia standard. This encoding will preserve the richness andfidelity of the data while achieving standardization for access, manipulation, and evolution ofcollections over time. Remote Access: we will develop new techniques supporting distributed access to digital col-lections in a heterogeneous networked environment. These techniques will be designed to satisfyaccess requirements across a spectrum that varies from very high quality local display and low-latency interactive manipulation, to remote access over wide-area, potentially low bitrate links. Display: we will develop new techniques for deploying scalable tiled projection displays forinstitutions and users who do not have access to sophisticated and dedicated technical support andhigh-cost hardware. These scalable display systems can be assembled from commodity hardwareand provide automatic, continuous calibration, and rapid reconfigurability.The motivation for this work stems from the need for high-quality preservation, access, and displaytechniques for digitized collections. Libraries, museums, and research scholars who want to acquire,manipulate, and provide remote access to (and high-definition display of)digitized artifacts need costeffective, non-intrusive, easily configurable methods for creating and viewing high-quality collections.New techniques will be evaluated on real-world library collections with particular focus on the preser-vation and dissemination of artifacts at our partner institution for this work, the Museo de Arte dePuerto Rico . With the aid of expert consultants who will contribute significant effort towards thisproject at our partner institution (see attached letter), we willdevelop and deploy a prototype systemfor acqusition and display using the techniques developed as part of this project. The resulting digitalarchive will be made accessible to patrons of the museum as well as a much larger audience around theworld via the Internet.We believe that this research will have significant immediate, medium-term and long-term impact.The immediate impact of the project will be the development of new acquisition, access, and displaymethods that will be deployed and tested at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, making parts of theircollections available in forms not previously possible. In the medium term, our new technical approacheswill be valuable not only to the digital library community, but also to other research, instructional, andcommercial areas where configurable large-scale display systems are needed (e.g., classroom, researchvisualization centers, conference venues, etc). In the long term, we believe this proposed work hasthe potential to substantially impact the way people view and interact with data, whether the data isa collection of historical artifacts, a visual representation of a complex simulation, data/illustrationspresenting in the classroom, etc. Moreover, the cost effectiveness of our approach means that it will beaffordable to a wide range of users.