MEGUG Lunch and Learn: Virtual Reality and Archaeologists: An Immersive Partnership for the Ages

Link to video 

VEMI: Using AR and VR as Modern Research Tools

Speaker: RJ Perry

Augmented and Virtual Reality are best known as novel entertainment media, but are they also suited for a professional environment? In this presentation I'll discuss how they best lend themselves to the field of GIS, why they are often the correct tools to use, and give a few examples of how The VEMI Lab has used them.

Virtual Reality and Archaeologists: An Immersive Partnership for the Ages

Speaker: Emily Blackwood

Virtual reality is a tool that can be used to enhance archeological analyses. This research explores using excavation data to develop a 3D immersive and interactive simulated environment representative of a 6,000-7000 year old archaeological site on the north-central coast of Peru. Incorporating virtual reality in site analyses provides an interface where data can be used to test various hypotheses and can be continuously updated and modified as new or additional data become available.

Speaker bios:

RJ Perry (he/him):

RJ is the Technical Coordinator at the VEMI Lab. He has an Associates in Electrical and Automation from Eastern Maine Community College, a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering Technology from the UMaine, and completed his Masters in Spatial Information Science and Engineering in 2017 at UMaine. He acts both as a Project Manager and as a Technical Advisor, and his interest in Software-Hardware integration lends itself well to the research and development projects conducted by the lab.

Emily Blackwood (she/her):

Emily is an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. (IPh.D) student at the VEMI Lab. Her academic interests include how humans have interacted with past environments and what we can learn from their behavior from an archaeological perspective. She is currently working on her third degree from UMaine having received her B.A. in Anthropology in 2015 and her M.S. in Quaternary and Climate Studies in 2019. For her doctoral research she is focused on reconstructing archaeological sites using virtual reality (VR) as a platform. The use of VR in archaeological research is still new to the discipline, but it is a powerful tool and platform that has the potential to allow archaeologists to examine sites through a different perspective, and create opportunities for use in museums, classrooms and to the general public.