Modeling Behavior in Digital Places Using Low-Level Perceptual Cues

Summary

Serious games and detailed 3D virtual models that allow researchers to explore multiple scenarios and reflect on different hypotheses or potential reconstructions are growing in number and increasingly viewed as serious scholarly tools. These reconstructions tend to heavily foreground the spatial and visual aspects of a place, a natural reflection of the character of the digital media in use. Studies of potential past experiences of these places, typically focused on movement through them and the visual experience as clues to the intentions of their creators or discrepant experiences of inhabitants and visitors, rely heavily on the described experiences of users of the virtual models and games. This raises a number of difficulties, widely acknowledged by the scholarly community, notably the pervasive influence of the cultural baggage of an individual modern explorer of the model. In this paper, using models of Knowth in the Bru na Boinne in Ireland, I present a formal modeling approach that uses the visual perception of space and shape, relying on low-level perceptual cues and scene-structure, to go beyond the individual user's experience and provide a rigorous analytic approach to the modeling of visual experience, on which interpretations can be built.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Simulating Social Complexity to Understand the Archaeological Past   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage