UPF has begun a series of participatory design workshops with the Museum of the History of Barcelona (MUHBA) with the goal of producing new augmented reality experiences for visitors to the excavation site of Barcino, the ancient Roman city beneath the streets of modern Barcelona. These experiences will be designed specifically for deployment on the AR Magic Lantern, a new augmented reality device which is UPF’s Lighthouse Project as a node of EMIL. We have welcomed some new members to the team to work on this next stage of our collaboration with MUHBA.
Anthropologist Ignacio José Roca joins us from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he is pursuing a master’s in Digital Culture and Humanities. He previously worked with the Secretary of Culture of La Pampa, Argentina, on an augmented reality application for the Cerro de los Viejos archeological site. He is coordinating the participatory design sessions and adapting the results into a blueprint for the experiences we will build for the AR Magic Lantern.
Renato Muñoz is a computer vision engineer who has joined us to work on the tracking and mapping challenges we will face when building the augmented reality experiences in the heritage site. He has just successfully defended his master’s thesis at the Universidad politécnica de Madrid, in which he worked at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland on autonomous and tele-operated robots to assist engineers in dangerous spaces.
