GIS Based Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences - Chpater 2

2 A Tool for Creating Pseudo-3D Spaces with Hyperphoto: An Application in Ethnographic Studies Hiroya Tanaka, Masatoshi Arikawa, Ryosuke Shibasaki, and Yuki Konagaya CONTENTS 2.1 Introduction..................................................................................................19 2.2 Related Concepts.........................................................................................22 2.2.1 Photo Collage...................................................................................22 2.2.2 Hypermedia .....................................................................................23 2.3 STAMP: A Tool for Hyperphoto Collage.................................................25 2.3.1 Concepts and System Overview...................................................25 2.3.2 STAMP-Maker..................................................................................27 2.3.3 STAMP-Navigator...........................................................................29 2.3.4 Visualization Options.....................................................................30 2.4 An Application.............................................................................................30 2.5 Conclusion ....................................................................................................32 References...............................................................................................................33 2.1 Introduction In the field of ethnography, researchers deal with a large number of photos. A researcher’s mission is to stay in developing countries, often in Asia or Africa, and describe their environment while sharing experiences with native people. During their stay, they try to record their everyday life in detail (Konagaya, 1991; Konagaya, 1998; Konagaya, 1999). Some research-ers will stay for about one year in the target locale and take more than 100 photos per day. Photos are a particularly useful medium for establishing 19 Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 20 GIS-based Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences a record of places, people, life, and atmosphere in a target area because they provide a rich source of information about spaces or places in the real world. The main advantages of photos in such studies are: · Instant acquisition: An ordinary camera can be used quickly and easily. · Rich information: Far from representing abstract data, photos are genuine records of real-world phenomena. · Subjectivity: A photo often reveals not only the photographer’s target, but also the subjective point of interest (POI) of the photog-rapher. · Scalability: Photos include micrographs, landscape photos, satellite photos, and so on. Photos thus enable us to examine the real world on any spatial scale. While photos are clearly the most important medium for such studies, several problems make it difficult to effectively manage large collections of photos. These problems are related to two aspects of the way we manage photos: · Organization and association · Browsing and interaction A few methods for organizing and associating photos have already been developed. For example, one method is to plot locations of photos onto two-dimensional (2D) maps like a typical geographical information sys-tems (GIS) (Figure 2.1). If the location (latitude and longitude) where each photo is taken can be recorded using global-positioning system (GPS) and other technologies, we can plot locations of photos onto a map almost automatically. However, such conventional methods do not enable us to sufficiently understand the relationships among photos. With regard to browsing and interaction, two general approaches are usually taken — the album approach and the slide show approach (Figure 2.2). However, neither of these is essentially interactive or sufficient to describe the dynamic experiences of the photographer. In this chapter, we describe a new method for managing photos through computers. We have developed and implemented a software that we call STAMP (Spatio-Temporal Association with Multiple Photos) [Tanaka (2002a), Tanaka (2002b), Tanaka (2003)]. STAMP allows us to easily create, publish, share, and navigate pseudo-three-dimensional (3D) spaces com-prised of multiple photos. With this software, users can create not only intensive scenes, but also extensive 3D scenes, which enable interactive and continuous navigation. Furthermore, users can relive their own or other’s experiences sequentially. Researchers can manage photos based on the context of the photos by using this software. Our software can solve Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC A Tool for Creating Pseudo-3D Spaces with Hyperphoto 21 FIGURE 2.1 Photos plotted their locations onto a 2D map. Time FIGURE 2.2 An album approach and a slide show approach. several of the problems mentioned above and advance the use of photo applications. In the following sections, we describe two important concepts that under-lie our approach — photo collage and hypermedia. In Section 2.3, we explain STAMP and discuss the characteristics of STAMP. In Section 2.4, we report on an experiment using STAMP, and then conclude in the final section. Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 22 GIS-based Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences FIGURE 2.3 An example of 2D photo collage. 2.2 Related Concepts 2.2.1 Photo Collage Our approach is based on artistic representation through the concept of photo collage on a 2D canvas; that is, a general method of organizing and associating photos. People can connect, overlap, and rotate photos on the 2D canvas to compose a single image that represents a memorable sight or event in the real world. Figure 2.3 shows an example of our photo collage. David Hockney, a famous artist who created so many photo collages, said that photo collage clearly reveals the photographer’s perception of the world (Hockney, 1985). David named the series of his photo collage works “Moving Focus.” This naming implies his notion about photo collage. Photo collage is an effective way to assemble multiple photos into one complete image. Moreover, we can read through multiple scenarios in a single photo collage. Figure 2.4 shows an example of the visual paths in our photo collage. The photo collage approach has shortcomings, though, in that it is only a static, 2D graphic representation. Our proposed representation is a pseudo- Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC A Tool for Creating Pseudo-3D Spaces with Hyperphoto 23 FIGURE 2.4 Visual paths in a photo collage. 3D and interactive representation, the details of which will be introduced in Section 2.3.3. 2.2.2 Hypermedia Our approach is also based on the hypermedia concept. In computer science, the hypermedia concept was a remarkable discovery. The World Wide Web (WWW), which most of us use daily, is based on hypermedia. The hyper-media structure is very simple. Only two elements, nodes and hyperlinks, are used to create hypermedia. We can apply various kinds of media as nodes, such as texts, images, sounds, movies, and so on. Historically, hypermedia concept was derived from hypertext concept. Simply saying, hypertext is a content network comprised of texts and hyper-links (Figures 2.5 and 2.6). There are several views regarding hypertext (Peter, 2003). One view of hypertext technology is that it is an authoring method. In other words, hypertext is a data-organization paradigm. It augments raw data with a rich, semantically meaningful structure. Hypertext also provides the means to create a context for data. This viewpoint implies that the meaning of data is not inherent in the data itself, but rather resides in the structures into which the data is incorporated. Data is, in itself, only useful when set into a context, structured, and reinterpreted to play a role in a particular setting. Some researchers view hypertext technology as an interaction paradigm; for exam-ple, browsing as an alternative to query. We can browse data by continuously Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ... - tailieumienphi.vn