virtual

Woodland Heritage Festival - Issue 2 - Virtual Heritage

Welcome to a special edition of the Archaeology and Ale Podcast;

For the next few podcasts we’ll be taking you through the Woodland Heritage Festival. Last week we looked at Human Osteology: this week, for something completely different, we’re introducing the talk “What is Virtual Archaeology, and how can you get involved?”, which was a part of the Festival’s talks programme.

The Woodland Heritage Festival was a two-day free public event at the J. G. Graves Woodland Discovery Centre in Sheffield, which had talks and hands-on displays on all kinds of archaeological topics.

The talks aimed to explain our archaeological interests in a family-friendly and accessible way, so all of the visitors to the Woodland Heritage Festival could come away with some new information about the past and how we study it. If you have any young archaeologists in your family this talk might be of interest to them as well.

This special edition introduces the topic of Virtual Archaeology, presented by Courtenay Crichton-Turner, a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. 

Courtenay shows some videos during her talk – I wasn’t able to get copies of those actual videos, but have tracked down some examples on Youtube, so you can see what she’s talking about!

Virtual Heritage: Augmented Reality – Directly augmented reality, where you can use your smartphone to view the reconstruction of an ancient site while standing in its present location https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4-TkpAAuPk 

Virtual Heritage: Augmented Reality – Indirectly augmented reality, where you can use your smartphone to view additional content from a pre-prepared poster, map or display..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFwzFby2eNo 

Apologies for the background noise – we were recording in the function room next to the cafeteria at the J. G. Graves Woodland Discovery Centre and it was a very busy day!

Stay tuned for another special edition introducing some more activities at the Woodland Heritage Festival. Next time we’ll be presenting a talk on Zooarchaeology.

If you’d like to know more about the Archaeology in the City Programme or the regular monthly Archaeology and Ale talks, visit our website; you can follow the link from the Archaeology Podcast Network page, or come and find us on facebook under Archaeology in the City. 

Thanks again to the Archaeology Podcast Network for having us.