Lively Experience of the Past of Leopoldsberg from Digital Archaeological Data

The main objective of this project is to research and develop tools to make abstract, digital archaeological and historical data perceivable for the public using mixed reality technology. Pastime events will be experienced in an interactive, multimodal way, simultaneously addressing more senses. For that purpose three mixed reality edutainment installations that mediate concrete historical facts will be constructed and evaluated. The pedagogical goal is to provoke the interest of users by surprising and exciting them. The installations are seamlessly embedded on the historical site and allow a blended experience of presence and pastime. The content and the story for the mixed reality installations are thereby directly derived from digital archaeological and historical data. The background for the story will be certain events or periods in history related to the Leopoldsberg in Vienna. They range from the age of the Celts to the end of World War II. Another research goal is the development of a tool to manage stratigraphic relations of an excavation site more efficiently. It is called Stratigraphic Sequence Composer or SSC for short and is used to build up and administer a representation of an archaeological stratification in form of a sequential diagram or Harris Matrix. It is planned to provide an interface to a data base and a GIS system, so that digital archaeological data can be directly accessed by selecting nodes of the Harris Matrix.