Over the years archaeologists have been swift to embrace new advances in technology that allow them to more comprehensively document the results of their work. Today it is commonplace to find information technologies, in the form MS Office-type tools with some CAD and GIS, deployed for primary data capture, analysis, presentation and publication. While these computing technologies can be used effectively to record and interpret archaeological sites, the radical developments in 3D recording, reconstruction and visualisation tools have had relatively limited impact upon the archaeological community. This is unfortunate as these new technologies have the potential to (a) enable the archaeologists to record their unrepeatable experiments to unprecedented levels of accuracy, (b) enable the archaeologists to reconstruct artefacts such as pottery from sherds, textures and sites from different eras (c) visualise the wealth of excavated information in dynamic new ways away from the archaeological site during post-excavation analysis, (d) make this wealth of detail available to the scholarly community as part of the publication process and secure its digital longevity through its deposition in a trusted digital library/archive and (e) communicate the excitement and importance of their archaeological site and its finds to an interested non-academic audience. This paper describes the overall concept of the EU funded project, 3D Measurement and Virtual Reconstruction of Ancient Lost Worlds of Europe (3D MURALE), that has developed and created a set of low-cost multimedia tools for recording, reconstructing, encoding, and visualising archaeological artefacts and site.

This low-cost indoor navigation system runs on off-the-shelf camera phones. More than 2,000 users at four different large-scale events have already used it. The system uses built-in cameras to determine user location in real time by detecting unobtrusive fiduciary markers. The required infrastructure is limited to paper markers and static digital maps, and common devices are used, facilitating quick deployment in new environments. The authors have studied the application quantitatively in a controlled environment and qualitatively during deployment at four large international events. According to test users, marker-based navigation is easier to use than conventional mobile digital maps. Moreover, the users' location awareness in navigation tasks improved. Experiences drawn from questionnaires, usage log data, and user interviews further highlight the benefits of this approach.

In many environments, the landscape of space and artefacts is evolving and changing with the tasks at hand. Integrating digital media and computation in these environments has to take into account the fact that people will configure space functions and tools according to the situation, organising use in unexpected ways. In this article, we present and discuss how the issue of configurability is dealt with, in a series of field trials with design students. The aim of these trials was to construct, for architecture and interaction design students, a mixed-media environment for inspirational learning. The results include physical infrastructure in space and in furniture as integral parts of the interaction technology and the creation of composite representations called "mixed objects`', which blend digital and non-digital media in one design artefact. Configurability has to be supported at different levels (infrastructures, artefacts, functions) and across the physical and digital realms.

This technical sketch describes an application for 3D sound using intuitive augmented reality interface. The AR/DJ was designed for the use in todays clubs, allowing a DJ to use the capabilities of 3D sound in such an environment, with the demands of being easy to use, enabling collaborative use and generating accurate and inter- active 3D sound.

In this paper we describe an advanced user interface enabling even playing games in an immersive virtual environment. There are no common input devices, users presence in the environment, movements, and body postures are the available tools for interaction. Furthermore, a publicly accessible installation in the Vienna Museum of Technology implementing such an advanced environment is described. In this installation computers are completely hidden, and it is one of the most popular exhibits in the museum, which has been accessed by more than 200,000 visitors since September 1999.

We demonstrate how we apply information visualization techniques to process monitoring. Virtual instruments are enhanced using history encoding instruments are capable of displaying the current value and the value from the near past. Multi-instruments are capable of displaying several data sources simultaneously. Levels of detail for virtual instruments are introduced where the screen area is inversely proportional to the information amount displayed. Furthermore the monitoring system is enhanced by using: 3D anchoring attachment of instruments to positions on a 3D model, collision avoidance a physically based spring model prevents instruments from overlapping, and focus+context rendering - giving the user a possibility to examine particular instruments in detail without loosing the context information.

Our starting point for developing the Studierstube system was the belief that augmented reality, the less obtrusive cousin of virtual reality, has a better chance of becoming a viable user interface for applications requiring manipulation of complex three-dimensional information as a daily routine. In essence, we are searching for a 3-D user interface metaphor as powerful as the desktop metaphor for 2-D. At the heart of the Studierstube system, collaborative augmented reality is used to embed computer-generated images into the real work environment. In the first part of this paper, we review the user interface of the initial Studierstube system, in particular the implementation of collaborative augmented reality, and the Personal Interaction Panel, a two-handed interface for interaction with the system. In the second part, an extended Studierstube system based on a heterogeneous distributed architecture is presented. This system allows the user to combine multiple approaches— augmented reality, projection displays, and ubiquitous computing—to the interface as needed. The environment is controlled by the Personal Interaction Panel, a twohanded, pen-and-pad interface that has versatile uses for interacting with the virtual environment. Studierstube also borrows elements from the desktop, such as multitasking and multi-windowing. The resulting software architecture is a user interface management system for complex augmented reality applications. The presentation is complemented by selected application examples.

This paper introduces the 3D Measurement and Virtual Reconstruction of Ancient Lost Worlds of Europe system (3D MURALE). It consists of a set of tools for recording, reconstructing, encoding, visualising and database searching/querying that operate on buildings, building parts, statues, statue parts, pottery, stratigraphy, terrain geometry and texture and material texture. The tools are loosely linked together by a common database on which they all have the facility to store and access data. The paper describes the overall architecture of the 3D MURALE system and then briefly describes the functionality of the tools provided by the project. The paper compares the multimedia studio architecture adopted in this project with other multimedia studio architectures.

We propose a framework for a complex visualization environment suitable for archaelogical applications. Given 2D and 3D data derived from appropriate acquisition processes, the scene is organized in a structure that can easily be incorporated into a database. Special care is taken on attributes such as time and likelihood of scientific hypothesises which are important for a correct interpretation of the excavation site. After a preprocessing step, the database content can directly be used to visualize the scene in a standalone virtual reality installation in a museum as well as on the internet.

The Virtual Table presents stereoscopic graphics to a user in a workbench-like setting. This paper reports on a user interface and new interaction techniques for the Virtual Table based on transparent props—a tracked hand-held pen and a pad. These props, but in particular the pad, are augmented with 3D graphics from the Virtual Table’s display. This configuration creates a very powerful and flexible interface for two-handed interaction that can be applied to other back-projected stereographic displays as well: the pad can serve as a palette for tools and controls as well as a window-like see-through interface, a plane-shaped and throughthe-plane tool, supporting a variety of new interaction techniques.