College Arts Association Presentation

Creative Director and Principal Investigator
College Arts Association, Chicago, IL, 2014
Funded by the School of Visual Arts (SOVA) at Virginia Tech
~Awarded tenure in spring, 2016

I presented Visual Histories in Virtual Spaces and Engaging on the Value of Artists’ Legacies at the College Art Association’s 102nd Annual Conference in Chicago, IL. The panel presentation included a group of art historians interested in pedagogy and technology. My presentation described four of my projects. The first involved the 3D scanning of several aboriginal sites in Australia including aboriginal cave paintings at Namdgi National Park. These scans went into 3D models to be used for initial testing and pipeline development in game engines.

The second project was my collaborative research with the Blackfoot Nation at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Museum in Siksika, Alberta where we scanned a tepee and recreated the form to be used in augmented reality format.

The third project involved using the FARO 3D laser scanner to scan the crypt at Ripon Cathedral in North Yorkshire. Ripon Cathedral is a beautiful, ancient church with a history reaching back to the 7th Century. The team explored the vernacular architectural mass and space reproduced in digital form, its performative and symbolic analysis, and its use as an educational tool.

And finally, I presented my work using the FARO 3D laser scanner to scan the Basilica of Saint Denis Cathedral in Paris, France. This was the first site where my team had adequate data to explore the point cloud in multiple VR settings, such as HMDs and the VT CAVE.

Collaborators: Dominic Marner (University of Guelph) and Ron Hawker (Alberta College of Art and Design).