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 Lucio Tommaso De Paolis
Antonio Mongelli (Eds.)
LNCS 8853

Augmented and
Virtual Reality
First International Conference, AVR 2014
Lecce, Italy, September 17–20, 2014
Revised Selected Papers

123
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Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
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Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India
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Lucio Tommaso De Paolis · Antonio Mongelli (Eds.)

Augmented and Virtual Reality

First International Conference, AVR 2014
Lecce, Italy, September 17–20, 2014
Revised Selected Papers

ABC
Editors
Lucio Tommaso De Paolis Antonio Mongelli
University of Salento University of Salento
Lecce Lecce
Italy Italy

ISSN 0302-9743 ISSN 1611-3349 (electronic)

Lecture Notes in Computer Science
ISBN 978-3-319-13968-5 ISBN 978-3-319-13969-2 (eBook)
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 Preface

This book contains the written contributions to the First International Conference on
Augmented and Virtual Reality (SALENTO AVR 2014) that has held in Lecce (Italy),
during September 17–20, 2014.
The aim of the SALENTO AVR 2014 has been to bring a community of researchers
from academia and industry, computer scientists, engineers, physicians together in order
to share points of views, knowledge, experiences and scientific and technical results,
related to state-of-the-art solutions and technologies on virtual and augmented reality
applications for medicine, cultural heritage, education, industrial sectors, as well as the
demonstration of advanced products and technologies.
The papers spans topics from virtual/augmented/mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) to 3D
user interfaces and the technology needed to enable these environments to a wide range
of applications (medical, entertainment, military, design, manufacture, maintenance,
arts, and cultural heritage).
The topics of the SALENTO AVR 2014 Conference were:

• input devices for VR/AR/MR

• 3D interaction for VR/AR/MR
• computer graphics techniques for VR/AR/MR
• advanced display technology
• haptic interfaces
• audio and other nonvisual interfaces
• tracking and sensing
• distributed VR/AR/MR
• VR toolkits
• modelling and simulation
• physical modelling
• perception and presence in virtual environment
• human-computer interface
• human-computer Interaction
• teleoperation and telepresence
• intuitive interactions and interfaces
• artificial life art
• interactive art
• navigation
• natural user interface
• gestural-based interaction
• interaction techniques for AR/MR
• collaborative learning environment
• augmented and mixed reality
• augmented visualization on mobile
• real-time 3D body reconstruction
VI Preface

• real-time capturing, compression, and rendering

• real-time gesture reconstruction
• body and facial animation
• behavioral simulation
• game design and development
• immersive gaming
• serious games
• VR/AR in minimally invasive surgery
• medical imaging processing, analysis, and visualization
• VR in preoperative surgical planning
• VR in surgical training
• VR in rehabilitation
• virtual patient
• VR/AR in education
• VR/AR in cultural heritage
• virtual museums and exhibitions
• VR in military simulation
• VR in spatial simulation
• VR in industrial simulation

We received 76 submissions from 15 countries. Each was been evaluated by at least

two members of the Program Committee and external reviewers. Based on these re-
views, 28 papers were selected for long oral presentations and 9 for poster talks. In
addition to the contributed papers, 2 tutorials and 3 keynote speaker presentations were
included in the conference program.
The geographical spread of the different institutions presenting their research was:
Belgium, Brasil, Canada, Estonia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Pak-
istan, Poland, Sweden, Taiwan, UK and USA.
We are very grateful to Program Committee members for volunteering their time
to review and discuss the submitted papers and doing so in a timely and professional
manner. We extend our thanks to University of Salento and other sponsors for provid-
ing support in the organization of the event. Last but not least, we would like to thank
all authors for presenting their work at the conference and we hope that all partici-
pants enjoyed the stimulating discussion as well as the opportunity to establish fruitful
interactions.

September 2014 Lucio Tommaso De Paolis

Antonio Mongelli
 Organization

Scientific Committee
Conference Chair
Lucio Tommaso De Paolis University of Salento, Italy

Conference Co-chair
Patrick Bourdot CNRS/LIMSI, University of Paris-Sud, France

Honorary Chair
Giovanni Aloisio University of Salento, Italy

Scientific Program Committee

Andrea Abate University of Salerno, Italy
Angelos Amditis Institute of Communication and Computer Systems
(ICCS), Greece
Bruno Arnaldi IRISA, France
Selim Balcisoy Sabancı University, Turkey
Roland Blach Fraunhofer IAO, Germany
Davide Borra NoReal.it, Italy
Pierre Boulanger University of Alberta, Canada
Massimo Cafaro University of Salento, Italy
Sergio Casciaro IFC-CNR, Italy
Bruno Carpentieri University of Salerno, Italy
Marcello Carrozzino Scuola Superiore Sant’ Anna, Italy
Mario Ciampi ICAR/CNR, Italy
Pietro Cipresso IRCCS Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Italy
Fernando Arambula Cosio Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
(UNAM), Mexico
Mirabelle D’Cruz University of Nottingham, UK
Yuri Dekhtyar Riga Technical University, Latvia
Alessandro De Mauro Vicomtech-IK4, Spain
Giorgio De Nunzio University of Salento, Italy
Alessandro Distante ISBEM, Italy
Aldo Franco Dragoni Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy
VIII Organization
Themis Exarchos
Dimitrios Fotiadis
Francesco Gabellone
Jaume Segura Garcia
Osvaldo Gervasi
Luigi Gallo
Viktors Gopejenko
Alexander Glaz
Mirko Grimaldi
Tomas Krilavičius
Torsten Kuhlen
Salvatore Livatino
Luca Mainetti
Arianna Menciassi
Daniel R. Mestre
Roberto Paiano
Giorgos Papadourakis
Sofia Pescarin
Paolo Proietti
James Ritchie
Oliver Staadt
Robert Stone
Doru Talaba
Franco Tecchia
Carlos M. Travieso–González
Manolis Tsiknaki
Virginia Valzano
Krzysztof Walczak
Charles Woodward
Domenico Zungri
Local Organizing Committee
Antonio Mongelli
University of Ioannina, Greece
University of Ioannina, Greece
IBAM ITLab, CNR, Italy
Universitat de València, Spain
University of Perugia, Italy
ICAR/CNR, Italy
Information Systems Management Institute
(ISMA), Latvia
Riga Technical University, Latvia
CRIL, University of Salento, Italy
Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
RWTH Aachen University, Germany
University of Hertfordshire, UK
University of Salento, Italy
Scuola Superiore Sant’ Anna, Italy
Aix-Marseille University/CNRS, France
University of Salento, Italy
Technological Educational Institute
of Crete, Greece
CNR ITABC, Italy
MIMOS, Italy
Heriot-Watt University, UK
University of Rostock, Germany
University of Birmingham, UK
Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania
Scuola Superiore Sant’ Anna, Italy
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria,
Spain
Technological Educational Institute of Crete,
Greece
CEIT, Italy
Poznań University of Economics, Poland
VTT Technical Research Centre, Finland
Future Labs, Italy
University of Salento, Italy
Tutorials
Virtual Reality and Augmented Visualization in Medicine
and Surgery

Lucio Tommaso De Paolis

AVR Lab, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

In medicine and surgery the Virtual Reality technology has made available new tools for
diagnosis and therapy definition by translating the information contained in the med-
ical images of the patients into 3D virtual models who are realistic replicas of real
patients with their actual pathologies. This has allowed the development of a new form
of medical education and training and the use of patient-specific surgical simulators has
permitted to practice and rehearse the surgical procedures on digital clones of the real
patients. New applications of Augmented Reality technology, by means of the overlap-
ping of virtual information on the real patient, provide systems that help surgeons in the
intra-operative phase and permit to perform their tasks in ways that are both faster and
safer. The use of the augmented visualization in surgery has the potential to bring the
advantages of the open-surgery visualization also in the minimally invasive surgery.
Lucio Tommaso De Paolis is an Assistant Professor of Information Processing
Systems and the scientific responsible of the Augmented and Virtual Reality Labo-
ratory (AVR Lab) at the Department of Engineering for Innovation of the University of
Salento, Italy; he is also the responsible of the “Advanced Techniques of Virtual Reality
for Medicine” research group of the DReAM (Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Research
Applied to Medicine) located at the Hospital of Lecce, Italy.
He received the Master Degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of
Pisa (Italy) in 1994 and after, first at the Scuola Superiore S.Anna of Pisa and then at
the University of Salento, his research interest concerns the study of realistic simulators
for surgical training and the development of applications of Virtual and Augmented
Reality in medicine and surgery.
De Paolis has been in 2014 visiting professor at the Tallinn Technical University
of Tallinn (Estonia), in 2012 visiting professor at the Vytautas Magnus University of
Kaunas (Lithuania), in 2011 visiting professor at the University of Tallinn (Estonia), in
2007 and 2010 visiting researcher at the Centro de Ciencias Aplicadas y Desarrollo Tec-
nológico (CCADET) – Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) – Mexico
City (Messico), and in 2007 and 2009 visiting researcher at Computer Graphics Labo-
ratory, Sabanci University of Istanbul (Turkey).
 Development of Immersive VR Applications Using XVR

Marcello Carrozzino

PERCRO Lab, Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Pisa, Italy

The tutorial will explain the basics on how to program a in immersive VR application
using the XVR technology, tackling general VR framework considerations and focusing
on the most recent development in the field of managing immersive devices such as
CAVEs and HMDs. Live examples of CAVE and Oculus Rift-based XVR applications
will be provided, together with interesting insights on the uses of such technologies for
mixed reality applications.
Marcello Carrozzino is an Assistant Professor of Computer Graphics and Virtual
Reality. His activities deal with the integration of Virtual Reality systems and Cultural
Heritage applications. Since 2005 he has been teaching the course of Virtual Environ-
ments held at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa. In 2006 he
attained a Ph.D. at Scuola Superiore S. Anna in Pisa with a thesis on Efficient Man-
agement of Complex Virtual Environments. From 2006 to 2009 he has been Assistant
Professor at IMT Lucca in the area of Technology and Management of Cultural Her-
itage. He is a founder of VRMedia s.r.l, a spin-off company of Scuola Superiore S. Anna
in Pisa. Since 2000 he has been collaborating with Scuola Superiore S. Anna, where he
is currently heading the Art, Cultural and Education Group of PERCRO Lab. He is a
founder of the Mnemosyne Digital Culture association and has participated to several
EU research projects, leaded regional projects, and authored or co-authored more than
sixty publications in journals, conference proceedings and book chapters.
Keynote Speakers
Fully Immersive Modification of Native CAD Data During
Project Reviews: Recent Results and Remaining Issues

Patrick Bourdot

CNRS/LIMSI, University Paris-Sud, France

This talk focuses on recent results on VR and CAD integration to make possible direct
and interactive modifications of CAD objects in immersive Virtual Environments (VE).
Using CAD software requires some skills (experience and knowledge), on its function-
alities and representations, as well as on objects (principally on their design history).
On the other hand, VR brings new interactive paradigms of 3D interaction, and one
needs intelligent middleware to manage CAD objects in immersive VE
After an overview of the main approaches in the VR-CAD integration field, we
focus on an extension of one of our previous work which proposed a mechanism al-
lowing implicit edition of the Construction History Graphs (CHG) of CAD objects via
a direct manipulation of their 3D visual representations. Based on labelling technique
of the Boundary Representations (B-Rep) elements, and coupled with an inference en-
gine, this mechanism is providing a backward chaining of B-Rep elements towards the
operators of the CHG. However, we had demonstrated that this approach up today only
on a dedicated CHG and specific persistent naming developed in the OpenCASCADE
framework. Recent results on the generalization of our approach makes possible to ap-
ply it to marketed CAD systems, software generally chose by industrials for a number
of years.
Firstly, this generalization aims to propose an architecture based on a VR-CAD data
model to apply our backward chaining mechanism to any CAD system based on B-Rep
and CHG models. Several encapsulations structures are proposed, to manage CHG op-
erators and their parameters, as well as the B-Rep components. Secondly, the B-Rep
labelling, now attached to these structures, has been extended to enable multiple back-
ward chaining, as some B-Rep elements may be the result of several CHG operators, so
that alternate decisions may be inferred from their manipulation. These improvements
make it possible to access direct and interactive modifications of existing CAD objects
by parsing their CHG to fill our structures with useful data. Moreover the multiple
backward-chaining mechanism grants the manipulation of CAD objects to non-experts
through the inference engine. As a proof of concept of our VR-CAD model, we detail
the application of our approach on CATIA, then we conclude on the remaining issues
and future works.
Patrick Bourdot is Research Director at CNRS and head of VENISE team (http://
www.limsi.fr/venise/), the Virtual & Augmented Reality (V&AR) research group he
has created in 2001 at CNRS/LIMSI lab. Architect graduated in 1986, he received
his PhD in Computer Sciences at the University of Aix-Marseille in 1992, joined the
CNRS/LIMSI lab in 1993. His main research focuses are multi-sensorimotor, multi-
modal and collaborative V&AR interactions, and the related issues for users’ perception
XVI P. Bourdot

and cognition. He coordinated the scientific partnership of his Lab or led a number of
research projects that have been or are currently funded by French government (RNTL,
ANR), or by national or regional research institutes (CNRS, DIGITEO). He has been
the founding secretary of AFRV, the French association of V&AR, and co-chaired its
5th conference (http://afrv2010.limsi.fr/). At the international level, one of his actions
has been to manage the CNRS Labs involved in INTUITION, the NoE of the 6th IST
framework focused on V&AR, where he was member of the Core Group. He is found-
ing member of EuroVR (www.eurovr-association.org), and has been re-elected last year
to its Executive Board. He organised the first Special Interest Groups meeting of Eu-
roVR (http://eurovr-eve-2010.limsi.fr/), during the inauguration of the EVE system, an
innovative CAVE-like setup, whose he defined the specification and implemented with
the VENISE team. He is presently organizing JVRC 2013, the 5th Joint Virtual Reality
Conference of EGVE and EuroVR (http://jvrc2013.sciencesconf.org/), which will take
this December in Paris area. Patrick Bourdot has a large number of international pub-
lications in most important V&AR conferences such as IEEE VR, ACM VRST, IEEE
3DUI or EGVE, and many others international or national papers in the fields of 3D
modelling, 3D reconstruction, and HCI. He has been or is reviewer or expert for several
national and international journals, conferences or research agencies.
 Simplifying Creation of VR/AR Applications
for Domain Experts

Krzysztof Walczak
Department of Information Technology
Poznan University of Economics, Poland

One of the main obstacles, which currently limits wider use of virtual and augmented
reality applications on everyday basis is the difficulty associated with the creation of
useful 3D content. Non-trivial, interactive 3D multimedia content is inherently difficult
to create. Not only geometry and appearance of particular elements must be properly
represented, but also temporal, structural, logical and behavioural aspects must be taken
into account. Moreover, creation of useful content requires participation of domain ex-
perts in this process. For example, a virtual museum exhibition should be set up by a
museum curator, while an augmented reality lesson should be designed by an experi-
enced teacher.
In this presentation, a range of methods aiming at simplification of the creation of
interactive 3D content by domain experts are discussed. These methods include:

• content componentisation – which enables the content to be configured from pre-

designed – possibly parameterised – blocks (geometrical, logical or behavioural);
• narrowing the application domain – which enables to increase the quality of the
created content, but at the same time limits the generality of the solution;
• narrowing content variability – which enables creating more complex content at the
cost of limited possibilities of content customisation.

Content can be also created collaboratively by groups of authors resulting in smaller

and more manageable tasks assigned to particular designers. Moreover, the whole con-
tent creation process can be divided into distinct phases, which can be performed by
designers with different responsibilities, skills and tools.
A promising research direction aiming at simplification of 3D content creation is
semantic content modelling. Semantic modelling enables creation of 3D content using
domain-specific ontologies, which domain experts are familiar with. Creation of an in-
teractive 3D scene consists then in building a semantic knowledge base using known
domain-specific concepts. Such a knowledge base may be created using a variety of
tools – from text-based semantic editors to semantically-enabled graphical 3D author-
ing packages.
Krzysztof Walczak received the M.Sc. degree in Electronics and Telecommunica-
tions in 1992 and in Computer Science in 1994, both from the Technical University of
Poznan. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2001 from the Techni-
cal University of Gdansk. From 1992 to 1996 he was with the Franco-Polish School
of New Information and Communication Technologies in Poznan. He spent over one
year as an invited researcher at the Syracuse University, NY, USA. In 1996 he joined
XVIII K. Walczak

the Department of Information Technology at the Poznan University of Economics,

where currently he is an associate professor. His current research interests include vir-
tual reality systems, multimedia systems, distance learning and semantic web. He was
acting as a technical coordinator in numerous research and industrial projects in these
domains.He is a member of Executive Committee of EuroVR Association, ACM (As-
sociation for Computing Machinery), Web3D Consortium and Board of Directors of
VSMM (International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia).
 Virtual Worlds: A Perfect Convergence Between Real
and Virtual Life

Davide Borra

NoReal.it, Italy

In a future work, daily life, health, and social relationships will be mediated by our
virtual alter-ego. Is the “metaverse” or “virtual world”, a sintetic on-line environment,
when our avatar can explore and build our space, van exchange, buy and sell our cre-
ations and abilities, when my expressions will be replicate in real-time on my avatar’s
face. It is virtual, aumented or mixed reality? What is difference from what we already
know about the cybernetic suites, the oculus visors, the immersive caves used in the
differents manifacture fields?
Second Life, Active Worlds and the others on-line platforms are always operatives?
I think we are in front to a singularity point of the digital humanism: we can be
immersed in a metaverse in a real-scale, with a series of good wearable devices, in a
very confortable psycological status, with a realistic multisensorial feedbacks.
The technology is quite ready to offer a domestic environment and we are ready to
offer to our avatar, a series of personal “messages” that it (or he/she?) can use in a social
relactionships to be more natural the communication.
Real-scale, device usability, humanization of communication. Three impact factors
to make the perfect convergence between real and virtual worlds.
Davide Borra is an architect with PHD in Environment and Territory (Politecnico
di Torino) and has about twenty years of experience in designing and creating of multi-
platform 3D contents in the area of cultural heritage, architecture and communications
company.
The 3D model genesi and the importance of the user in the information cycle based
on virtuality, are the main topics of his research in both academic and vocational ed-
ucation, which resulted in applications for museums and exhibit and in a number of
scientific articles published.
The last experiments concern the latest Mobile 3D, 3D Metaverses on-line and the
Augmented Reality.
For a decade, he taught 3D in the Faculty of Architecture of the Politecnico di Torino
and Milan.
In 1999 he founded NoReal [www.noreal.it], a company specialized in Virtual Cul-
tural Heritage, which currently manages.
Since 2008 he is the President of MIMOS (Italian Movement of Modelling and
Simulation) [www.mimos.it].
Actually he is one of the international experts invited to discuss about the principles
of the Virtual Cultural Heritage around the London Charter and the Sevilla Principles.
 Contents

Education

A MAR Game Design via a Remote Control Module . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Chi-Fu Lin, Pai-Shan Pa, and Chiou-Shann Fuh

Investigation on Player and Virtual Environment Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Aušra Vidugirien_e, Aist_e Pranckevičien_e, Egidijus Vaškevičius,
and Minija Tamošiūnait_e

Real-Time Single Camera Hand Gesture Recognition System for Remote

Deaf-Blind Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Giuseppe Airò Farulla, Ludovico Orlando Russo, Chiara Pintor,
Daniele Pianu, Giorgio Micotti, Alice Rita Salgarella, Domenico Camboni,
Marco Controzzi, Christian Cipriani, Calogero Maria Oddo, Stefano Rosa,
and Marco Indaco

Measuring the Student’s Success Rate Using a Constraint Based Multi-modal

Virtual Assembly Environment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Inam Ur Rehman, Sehat Ullah, and Ihsan Rabbi

The Effect of Multimodal Virtual Chemistry Laboratory on Students’

Learning Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Numan Ali, Sehat Ullah, Ihsan Rabbi, and Aftab Alam

Medicine

Virtual Reality Surgical Navigation System for Holmium Laser Enucleation

of the Prostate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Giuseppe Lo Presti, Cinzia Freschi, Sara Sinceri, Girolamo Morelli,
Mauro Ferrari, and Vincenzo Ferrari

Development of a Serious Game for Laparoscopic Suture Training . . . . . . . 90

Lucio Tommaso De Paolis, Francesco Ricciardi, and Francesco Giuliani

A Method of Three-Dimensional Visualization of Molecular Processes

of Apoptosis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Ravil I. Muhamedyev, Vlad Gladkikh, Viktors I. Gopejenko,
Yevgenia A. Daineko, Alma T. Mansharipova, Elena L. Muhamedyeva,
and Aleksejs V. Gopejenko
XXII Contents

AGITO: Virtual Reality Environment for Power Systems Substations

Operators Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Tiago Ramos Ribeiro, Paulo Roberto Jansen dos Reis,
Geraldo Braz Júnior, Anselmo Cardoso de Paiva, Aristófanes Corrêa Silva,
Ivana Marcia Oliveira Maia, and Antônio Sérgio Araújo

Lossless Compression of Multidimensional Medical Images for Augmented

Reality Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Bruno Carpentieri and Raffaele Pizzolante

Low-Cost Motion-Tracking for Computational Psychometrics Based on

Virtual Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Pietro Cipresso, Silvia Serino, Irene Alice Chicchi Giglioli, Igor Giuliano,
Davide Borra, Andrea Farina, and Giuseppe Riva

Augmented and Mixed Reality

A Design and Evaluation Framework for a Tele-Immersive Mixed

Reality Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Simon Crowle, Michael Boniface, Benjamin Poussard,
and Stylianos Asteriadis

Hand Orientation Regression Using Random Forest for Augmented Reality . . . 159
Muhammad Asad and Greg Slabaugh

Visualization of Power Systems Based on Panoramic Augmented

Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Paulo Roberto Jansen dos Reis, Daniel Lima Gomes Junior,
Antônio Sérgio de Araújo, Geraldo Braz Júnior, Aristófanes Corrêa Silva,
and Anselmo Cardoso de Paiva

A Workflow Analysis for Implementing AR-Based Maintenance Procedures . . . 185

Federico Manuri, Andrea Sanna, Fabrizio Lamberti, Gianluca Paravati,
and Pietro Pezzolla

Augmented Reality at the Industrial Shop-Floor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

Anna Syberfeldt, Oscar Danielsson, Magnus Holm, and Tom Ekblom

Robust Global Tracking Using a Seamless Structured Pattern of Dots. . . . . . 210

Lode Jorissen, Steven Maesen, Ashish Doshi, and Philippe Bekaert

Lightweight Augmented Reality Tools for Lean Procedures

in Future Factories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Francesco Capozzi, Valerio Lorizzo, Gianfranco Modoni,
and Marco Sacco

Interactive Augmented Omnidirectional Video with Realistic Lighting . . . . . 247

Nick Michiels, Lode Jorissen, Jeroen Put, and Philippe Bekaert
 Contents XXIII

Cultural Heritage

Natural Interaction and Wearable Augmented Reality for the Enjoyment

of the Cultural Heritage in Outdoor Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Giuseppe Caggianese, Pietro Neroni, and Luigi Gallo

Virtual Reality Visualization for Photogrammetric 3D Reconstructions

of Cultural Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Heiko Herrmann and Emiliano Pastorelli

Augmented Reality for Allowing Time Navigation in Cultural Tourism

Experiences: A Case Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
Alessandro Fiore, Luca Mainetti, Luigi Manco, and Palmalisa Marra

Easy Perception Lab: Evolution, Brain and Virtual and Augmented

Reality in Museum Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
Sara Invitto, Italo Spada, Dario Turco, and Genuario Belmonte

Visualization and 3D Modelling

On-Demand Generation of 3D Content Based on Semantic Meta-Scenes. . . . 313

Krzysztof Walczak and Jakub Flotyński

Moka: Designing a Simple Scene Graph Library for Cluster-Based

Virtual Reality Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
Andrea Salvadori, Andrea Brogni, Giordano Mancini,
and Vincenzo Barone

Stereoscopic-3D Vision to Improve Situational Awareness in Military

Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
Alessandro Zocco, Salvatore Livatino, and Lucio Tommaso De Paolis

Roll and Pitch Estimation Using Visual Horizon Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . 363

Silvio Del Pizzo, Salvatore Troisi, Antonio Angrisano,
and Salvatore Gaglione

3D Model Visualization and Interaction Using a Cubic Fiducial Marker . . . . 381

Ihsan Rabbi and Sehat Ullah

Posters

Intuitive Visualization of Reflectance Transformation Imaging

for Interactive Analysis of Cultural Artifacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397
David Vanoni, Li Ge, and Falko Kuester

Euclidean Vectors in Physics Education Using Augmented Reality. . . . . . . . 405

Angel Chi-Poot and Anabel Martin-Gonzalez
XXIV Contents

SLAM Map Application for Tracking Lights on Car Dashboards . . . . . . . . . 413

Francesco Carotenuto, Ugo Erra, and Vittorio Scarano

A Live Augmented Reality Tool for Facilitating Interpretation

of 2D Construction Drawings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
Stéphane Côté, Myriam Beauvais, Antoine Girard-Vallée, and Rob Snyder

Augmented Reality Simulator for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy Training . . . 428

Rosanna Maria Viglialoro, Sara Condino, Marco Gesi, Mauro Ferrari,
and Vincenzo Ferrari

Tile Tracker: A Practical and Inexpensive Positioning System

for Mobile AR Applications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 434
Steven Maesen, Yunjun Liu, Patrik Goorts, and Philippe Bekaert

Designing an Interactive and Augmented 3D Environment with Passive

Tactile Feedback for Veterinary Training. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 442
Arnis Cirulis and Evija Liepina

Investigation on Human Attentiveness to Video Clips Using Neurosky

and LIRIS-ACCEDE Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 450
Edgaras Ščiglinskas and Aušra Vidugirien_e

Virtual Acoustic Reconstruction of the Church at the Lost Monastery

of Santa Maria de la Murta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457
Ana Planells, Jaume Segura, Arturo Barba, Salvador Cerdá,
Alicia Giménez, and Rosa M. Cibrián

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465

Education
 A MAR Game Design via a Remote Control Module

Chi-Fu Lin1( ), Pai-Shan Pa2, and Chiou-Shann Fuh1

1
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering,
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
daky1983@gmail.com, fuh@csie.ntu.edu.tw
2
Graduate School of Toy and Game Design,
National Taipei University of Education, Taipei, Taiwan
myhow@seed.net.tw

Abstract. This paper intends to propose an interactive system that allows users to
remotely control device and combine augmented reality content with the applica-
tion. It is possible to generate games or education applications. Using augmented
Reality and remote-control module as starting point, we design a MAR (Mobile
Augmented Reality) game that contains shooting game, roadblock hindrance, and
traffic signal game. Then use the mobile remote-control module to control the
device. Finally, use augmented reality technology to allow real objects to interact
directly with the virtual objects. As a platform to integrate mobile phone, we
complete the development of augmented reality remote-control module applica-
tion. The difference from the general AR applications is that our proposed method
combines the remote-control objects to interact with virtual objects.

Keywords: MAR · Game design · Remote control

1 Introduction
1.1 Background and Motivation
With the development of mobile Augmented Reality (AR) enabling technology, there
have been many mobile AR applications, services, and contents. Due to the demand
for software resources in recent years, more and more large, relatively rising smart-
phone hardware, augmented reality technology in the past can only be used on the
computer, because the pixels of the camera to enhance graphics processing progress,
can now also be applied in the mobile phone software. Because the phone is easy to
carry, augmented reality is able to generate more interactive applications, such as
interactive advertising, navigation, books, and games.
Nowadays augmented reality still needs to use the mark to reach a recognition tar-
get. Mark setup as well as mark portability still has much room for improvement.
Thus many studies aim to improve recognition technology. For example, use the mark
to replace a specific image augmented reality, or to replace the electronic information
other than the image tag identification, such as geographic information to achieve the
effect of augmented reality and Global Positioning System (GPS).
Lack of dynamic expansions of the new features or styles is disadvantage of physic
toys. If we want to add new features or a new style must be additional to buy, but it
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
L.T. De Paolis and A. Mongelli (Eds.): AVR 2014, LNCS 8853, pp. 3–18, 2014.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-13969-2_1
4 C.-F. Lin et al.

will waste space and increase costs. Thus, the concept is to make augmented reality
mobile platform. Use digital content within the practical function of the mobile device
to match hardware and software to achieve the effect of human-computer interaction.
This paper consists of five sections. In Section 2, we will summarize related works.
The system overview is in Section 3. Then, we describe implementation of the system
in Section 4. Finally, we will conclude in Section 5.

2 Related Work
2.1 Development and Application of Augmented Reality
Definition of the Augmented Reality
Augmented reality is a form of virtual reality. Virtual reality allows users to fully
integrate into the computer-generated virtual environment. We cannot see the reality
of its surrounding environment. Augmented Reality allows the user to see the reality
of the environment, as well as the synthesis of virtual objects in the real environment
superimposed or contrasted with virtual reality. Therefore, Augmented Reality aug-
ments real environment rather than completely replaces real environment. Augmented
reality has the following three characteristics: combination of real and virtual, real-
time interactivity, and three-dimensions [1].
Principle of the Augmented Reality
Real and virtual images are combined and displayed to the user on the small screen inside
the helmet [1, 2]. The equipment and technology, coupled with immaturity, high cost,
inconvenience to carry, cannot be accepted for general users. But the popularity of PC
and network cameras makes a new way to achieve augmented reality. Use a webcam to
identify the real environment. The video is output to PC monitors. Hardware price in this
mode of operation is quite cheap. Therefore the popularity of augmented reality increases
[3]. Another paper describes an RF-based approach to mobile augmented reality [4].
Because of the rapid development of mobile devices, augmented reality has ex-
tended from personal computers to mobile devices. The highly interactive nature of
augmented reality with its user has given rise to various augmented reality applica-
tions for mobile devices [5]. AR can be used in handheld games, it has more novel
play experience for people [6]. After integrating the virtual and real world, it can im-
prove the convenience for people. AR can be used in classroom as teaching tool. A
study analysis by the use of the AR book in classroom indicates that the interaction
can strengthen the study result for all ages [7]. The authors research how augmented
reality can increase the selective and sustained attention of children with autism dur-
ing object discrimination therapies and elicit more positive emotions [8].
There are several SDKs and platforms to realize augmented reality. Qualcomm
Vuforia [9] is a software platform for Android, iOS, and package for Unity3d [23]
that enables app to recognize mark from a Vuforia target database or in the Vuforia
Cloud Recognition Service. It allows users to track objects such as two-dimensional
planar mark, three-dimensional cube, and cylinder-shape object. It also supports real-
time text recognition. ARtag and ARtoolkit are C/C++ open source platforms which
support tracking 2D mark and displaying openGL [10]. BazAR is a computer vision
library based on matching and feature point detection. In particular, it is able to quick-
ly detect and register known planar objects in images [11].
 A MAR Game Design via a Remote Control Module 5

2.2 Analyses and Discussions

The human-computer interaction toys can be classified into two types. The first type
is mobile device combined with Augmented Reality. Another one is physical toy
communication with mobile device. We discuss and analyze two types below.
Interactive Mobile Device and Augmented Reality
Use the camera on mobile device to recognize target and generate 3D models on the
screen. Augmented reality has for years been one of the focuses in mobile phone ap-
plication development, ranging from mere interaction to marketing, games, naviga-
tion, and so on. The highly interactive nature of augmented reality with its user has
given rise to various augmented reality applications for mobile phones.
With Hoops AR [12], user simply views the ticket using a mobile device, and then
the basketball ticket turns into an interactive basketball game. By using user’s finger
to shoot the basketball to control the speed of the shot. An iPad app, Barbie Digital
Mirror [13] uses augmented reality to let kids try on makeup. When user looks in the
interactive mirror, user dips a make-up tool into pretend makeup, and it appears on
her face. The iButterfly [14] app generates a butterfly on the screen combining AR
with Global Positioning System (GPS) information, and then user can catch butterfly
which becomes a coupon. Popar [15] Toys uses Augmented Reality technology to
create an immersive reading experience. It is designed to change the way users inter-
act and experience stories, adventures, and learning. Table 1 shows a comparisons of
various AR software.
Interactive Toys and Mobile Device
It generates different experiences by interactive toys and mobile device using sensor
on mobile device connected to toys and interacting with each other.
The first type is mobile device connected with toy via Bluetooth, Infrared Module,
Wireless, and so on by using mobile device for remote control. User can control toys
through mobile device remotely when the connection is successful. Helicopter and
remote-control car use this type. Table 2 shows comparisons of various toys com-
bined with mobile software.
The second type uses toys to control game. Apptivity [16] action games include
toys and an iPad app. The iPad recognizes the toy thanks to Mattel’s patented “Active
Touch” technology when kids use the physical toys to play the app game. The
Apptivity action games will include several popular themes such as Fruit Ninja, An-
gry Birds, and Batman: The Dark Knight Rises. Adding different shapes of touch
points to toy’s bottom to achieve recognition. It recognizes shapes and triggers the
corresponding event by touching the toy on iPad.
Augmented reality interactions have been classified into three categories. The first
category uses computer and webcam to identify the specified tag. The disadvantage is
lack of mobility in this method. The second category is a popular method in recent
years. This method uses mobile device and camera to identify the specified tag, then
generates 3D models on the screen. A user clicks on the touch screen to interact with
digital content on the mobile device. The advantage is more mobility in this method.
However the real interaction experiences are not enough. The third category is similar
6 C.-F. Lin et al.

to the second category, but it provides more realistic experiences. Through augmented
reality detection effect, user directly uses fingers to interact with digital content in a
real environment. Table 3 shows a comparison of augmented reality interactions.

Table 1. Comparisons of Various AR Software

Advantage Disadvantage

The effect of the AR and play Need to buy expensive AR Drone

AR Drone [17]
against other players. aircraft.

Simple and practical transla- Four translation languages (English,

Word Lens [18] tion software can be used Italian, French, and Spanish) are too
without Internet. few.

Butterfly shape combined

with advertising, marketing Single marketing function, low user
iButterfly [14]
effect by capturing various viscosity.
butterflies.

A basketball court for the

Hoops AR [12] Need to prepare a mark for the game.
mark, to enhance game play.

Need to turn on the camera and In-

Layar [19] Intuitive navigation screen. ternet connection to use navigation,
consume much electricity.

Table 2. Comparisons of Various Devices Combined with Mobile Software

Mobile Device Devices

AR Drone [17] Bluetooth: Mobile device Bluetooth: Receive mo-

connects with toy via Blue- bile device’s signal to
tooth. control toy.

RoboMe [20] Microphone: voice command User will be able to

recognition, and remote vid- change the face that ap-
eo control. pears on the screen and
Camera: Face detection and the voice to different
tracking accents.

Apptivity [16] The iPad recognizes the toy Touch point with differ-
thanks to Mattel’s patented ent shapes at toy bottom.
“Active Touch” technology.
 A MAR Game Design via a Remote Control Module 7

Table 2. (Continued)

Silverlit R/C Car

[21] Bluetooth: Mobile device Bluetooth: Receive mo-
connects with toy via Blue- bile device’s signal to
Silverlit helicopter tooth. control toy.
[21]

Table 3. Comparison of Augmented Reality Interactions

Illustration pictures Description

Through setting the

virtual buttons on the
Virtual button marker, when virtual but-
of AR [9] ton occlusion is detected,
our system triggers corre-
sponding event.

Popular aug- A user clicks on the

mented reality touch screen to interact
on the mobile with digital content on the
device. mobile device.

Webcam identification
Augmented of the main tag. Users
reality on an also need to use other
early computer specified tag to interact
with digital content.

3 System Overview
Our proposed system enables the user to remotely control device by mobile device and
let physical remote control device or toy to interact with virtual object. We analyze
operational processes summarized into two modes in Figures 1 and 2. There are five
major roles in the system consisting of user, mobile device, remote-control device, tag,
and virtual object. In Mode 1, user can use mobile device to remotely control device. Use
the mobile device’s camera to recognize the predefined tag and render virtual object. The
remote-control device via virtual button interacts with virtual object.
8 C.-F. Lin et al.

The difference between Modes 2 and 1 is that Mode 2 adds a tag in the remote-
control device. When mobile device identifies the tag, it will produce a corresponding
virtual object, allowing original device to have more diversification. The concept is
somewhat similar to the movie “Transformers [22]” and each device can be trans-
formed into any types. Mode 2 allows more interesting interaction.

Remote-Control
Device
Mobile Device

Play Control
Interactive
Interactive
User
Recognition

Tag Rendering Virtual Object

Fig. 1. System process diagram - Mode 1

Virtual Object

Rendering

Remote-Control
Recognition
Device and Tag
Mobile Device

Play Control
Interactive
Interactive
User
Recognition

Tag Rendering Virtual Object

Fig. 2. System process diagram - Mode 2

Another random document with
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word ὥρα received the (Babylonian) significance of “hour”; prior to
that there was no exact subdivision of the day. In Babylon and Egypt
water-clocks and sun-dials were discovered in the very early stages,
yet in Athens it was left to Plato to introduce a practically useful form
of clepsydra, and this was merely a minor adjunct of everyday utility
which could not have influenced the Classical life-feeling in the
smallest degree.
It remains still to mention the corresponding difference, which is
very deep and has never yet been properly appreciated, between
Classical and modern mathematics. The former conceived of things
as they are, as magnitudes, timeless and purely present, and so it
proceeded to Euclidean geometry and mathematical statics,
rounding off its intellectual system with the theory of conic sections.
We conceive things as they become and behave, as function, and
this brought us to dynamics, analytical geometry and thence to the
Differential Calculus.[9] The modern theory of functions is the
imposing marshalling of this whole mass of thought. It is a bizarre,
but nevertheless psychologically exact, fact that the physics of the
Greeks—being statics and not dynamics—neither knew the use nor
felt the absence of the time-element, whereas we on the other hand
work in thousandths of a second. The one and only evolution-idea
that is timeless, ahistoric, is Aristotle’s entelechy.
This, then, is our task. We men of the Western Culture are, with
our historical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is our
world picture and not all mankind’s. Indian and Classical man formed
no image of a world in progress, and perhaps when in due course
the civilization of the West is extinguished, there will never again be
a Culture and a human type in which “world-history” is so potent a
form of the waking consciousness.
 VI
What, then, is world-history? Certainly, an ordered presentation of
the past, an inner postulate, the expression of a capacity for feeling
form. But a feeling for form, however definite, is not the same as
form itself. No doubt we feel world-history, experience it, and believe
that it is to be read just as a map is read. But, even to-day, it is only
forms of it that we know and not the form of it, which is the mirror-
image of our own inner life.
Everyone of course, if asked, would say that he saw the inward
form of History quite clearly and definitely. The illusion subsists
because no one has seriously reflected on it, still less conceived
doubts as to his own knowledge, for no one has the slightest notion
how wide a field for doubt there is. In fact, the lay-out of world-history
is an unproved and subjective notion that has been handed down
from generation to generation (not only of laymen but of professional
historians) and stands badly in need of a little of that scepticism
which from Galileo onward has regulated and deepened our inborn
ideas of nature.
Thanks to the subdivision of history into “Ancient,” “Mediæval” and
“Modern”—an incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme, which has,
however, entirely dominated our historical thinking—we have failed
to perceive the true position in the general history of higher mankind,
of the little part-world which has developed on West-European[10] soil
from the time of the German-Roman Empire, to judge of its relative
importance and above all to estimate its direction. The Cultures that
are to come will find it difficult to believe that the validity of such a
scheme with its simple rectilinear progression and its meaningless
proportions, becoming more and more preposterous with each
century, incapable of bringing into itself the new fields of history as
they successively come into the light of our knowledge, was, in spite
of all, never whole-heartedly attacked. The criticisms that it has long
been the fashion of historical researchers to level at the scheme
mean nothing; they have only obliterated the one existing plan
without substituting for it any other. To toy with phrases such as “the
Greek Middle Ages” or “Germanic antiquity” does not in the least
help us to form a clear and inwardly-convincing picture in which
China and Mexico, the empire of Axum and that of the Sassanids
have their proper places. And the expedient of shifting the initial
point of “modern history” from the Crusades to the Renaissance, or
from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th Century, only
goes to show that the scheme per se is regarded as unshakably
sound.
It is not only that the scheme circumscribes the area of history.
What is worse, it rigs the stage. The ground of West Europe is
treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of
the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it
—and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far-away
Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a
quaintly conceived system of sun and planets! We select a single bit
of ground as the natural centre of the historical system, and make it
the central sun. From it all the events of history receive their real
light, from it their importance is judged in perspective. But it is in our
own West-European conceit alone that this phantom “world-history,”
which a breath of scepticism would dissipate, is acted out.
We have to thank that conceit for the immense optical illusion
(become natural from long habit) whereby distant histories of
thousands of years, such as those of China and Egypt, are made to
shrink to the dimensions of mere episodes while in the
neighbourhood of our own position the decades since Luther, and
particularly since Napoleon, loom large as Brocken-spectres. We
know quite well that the slowness with which a high cloud or a
railway train in the distance seems to move is only apparent, yet we
believe that the tempo of all early Indian, Babylonian or Egyptian
history was really slower than that of our own recent past. And we
think of them as less substantial, more damped-down, more diluted,
because we have not learned to make the allowance for (inward and
outward) distances.
It is self-evident that for the Cultures of the West the existence of
Athens, Florence or Paris is more important than that of Lo-Yang or
Pataliputra. But is it permissible to found a scheme of world-history
on estimates of such a sort? If so, then the Chinese historian is quite
entitled to frame a world-history in which the Crusades, the
Renaissance, Cæsar and Frederick the Great are passed over in
silence as insignificant. How, from the morphological point of view,
should our 18th Century be more important than any other of the
sixty centuries that preceded it? Is it not ridiculous to oppose a
“modern” history of a few centuries, and that history to all intents
localized in West Europe, to an “ancient” history which covers as
many millennia—incidentally dumping into that “ancient history” the
whole mass of the pre-Hellenic cultures, unprobed and unordered,
as mere appendix-matter? This is no exaggeration. Do we not, for
the sake of keeping the hoary scheme, dispose of Egypt and
Babylon—each as an individual and self-contained history quite
equal in the balance to our so-called “world-history” from
Charlemagne to the World-War and well beyond it—as a prelude to
classical history? Do we not relegate the vast complexes of Indian
and Chinese culture to foot-notes, with a gesture of embarrassment?
As for the great American cultures, do we not, on the ground that
they do not “fit in” (with what?), entirely ignore them?
The most appropriate designation for this current West-European
scheme of history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow
orbits round us as the presumed centre of all world-happenings, is
the Ptolemaic system of history. The system that is put forward in
this work in place of it I regard as the Copernican discovery in the
historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the
Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India,
Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico—separate worlds of
dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the
general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently
surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power.
 VII
The scheme “ancient-mediæval-modern” in its first form was a
creation of the Magian world-sense. It first appeared in the Persian
and Jewish religions after Cyrus,[11] received an apocalyptic sense in
the teaching of the Book of Daniel on the four world-eras, and was
developed into a world-history in the post-Christian religions of the
East, notably the Gnostic systems.[12]
This important conception, within the very narrow limits which fixed
its intellectual basis, was unimpeachable. Neither Indian nor even
Egyptian history was included in the scope of the proposition. For the
Magian thinker the expression “world-history” meant a unique and
supremely dramatic act, having as its theatre the lands between
Hellas and Persia, in which the strictly dualistic world-sense of the
East expressed itself not by means of polar conceptions like the
“soul and spirit,” “good and evil” of contemporary metaphysics, but
by the figure of a catastrophe, an epochal change of phase between
world-creation and world-decay.[13]
No elements beyond those which we find stabilized in the
Classical literature, on the one hand, and the Bible (or other sacred
book of the particular system), on the other, came into the picture,
which presents (as “The Old” and “The New,” respectively) the
easily-grasped contrasts of Gentile and Jewish, Christian and
Heathen, Classical and Oriental, idol and dogma, nature and spirit
with a time connotation—that is, as a drama in which the one
prevails over the other. The historical change of period wears the
characteristic dress of the religious “Redemption.” This “world-
history” in short was a conception narrow and provincial, but within
its limits logical and complete. Necessarily, therefore, it was specific
to this region and this humanity, and incapable of any natural
extension.
But to these two there has been added a third epoch, the epoch
that we call “modern,” on Western soil, and it is this that for the first
time gives the picture of history the look of a progression. The
oriental picture was at rest. It presented a self-contained antithesis,
with equilibrium as its outcome and a unique divine act as its turning-
point. But, adopted and assumed by a wholly new type of mankind, it
was quickly transformed (without anyone’s noticing the oddity of the
change) into a conception of a linear progress: from Homer or Adam
—the modern can substitute for these names the Indo-German, Old
Stone Man, or the Pithecanthropus—through Jerusalem, Rome,
Florence and Paris according to the taste of the individual historian,
thinker or artist, who has unlimited freedom in the interpretation of
the three-part scheme.
This third term, “modern times,” which in form asserts that it is the
last and conclusive term of the series, has in fact, ever since the
Crusades, been stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at
which it will bear no more.[14] It was at least implied if not stated in so
many words, that here, beyond the ancient and the mediæval,
something definitive was beginning, a Third Kingdom in which,
somewhere, there was to be fulfilment and culmination, and which
had an objective point.
As to what this objective point is, each thinker, from Schoolman to
present-day Socialist, backs his own peculiar discovery. Such a view
into the course of things may be both easy and flattering to the
patentee, but in fact he has simply taken the spirit of the West, as
reflected in his own brain, for the meaning of the world. So it is that
great thinkers, making a metaphysical virtue of intellectual necessity,
have not only accepted without serious investigation the scheme of
history agreed “by common consent” but have made of it the basis of
their philosophies and dragged in God as author of this or that
“world-plan.” Evidently the mystic number three applied to the world-
ages has something highly seductive for the metaphysician’s taste.
History was described by Herder as the education of the human
race, by Kant as an evolution of the idea of freedom, by Hegel as a
self-expansion of the world-spirit, by others in other terms, but as
regards its ground-plan everyone was quite satisfied when he had
thought out some abstract meaning for the conventional threefold
order.
On the very threshold of the Western Culture we meet the great
Joachim of Floris (c. 1145-1202),[15] the first thinker of the Hegelian
stamp who shattered the dualistic world-form of Augustine, and with
his essentially Gothic intellect stated the new Christianity of his time
in the form of a third term to the religions of the Old and the New
Testaments, expressing them respectively as the Age of the Father,
the Age of the Son and the Age of the Holy Ghost. His teaching
moved the best of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, Dante,
Thomas Aquinas, in their inmost souls and awakened a world-
outlook which slowly but surely took entire possession of the
historical sense of our Culture. Lessing—who often designated his
own period, with reference to the Classical as the “after-world”[16]
(Nachwelt)—took his idea of the “education of the human race” with
its three stages of child, youth and man, from the teaching of the
Fourteenth Century mystics. Ibsen treats it with thoroughness in his
Emperor and Galilean (1873), in which he directly presents the
Gnostic world-conception through the figure of the wizard Maximus,
and advances not a step beyond it in his famous Stockholm address
of 1887. It would appear, then, that the Western consciousness feels
itself urged to predicate a sort of finality inherent in its own
appearance.
But the creation of the Abbot of Floris was a mystical glance into
the secrets of the divine world-order. It was bound to lose all
meaning as soon as it was used in the way of reasoning and made a
hypothesis of scientific thinking, as it has been—ever more and more
frequently—since the 17th Century.
It is a quite indefensible method of presenting world-history to
begin by giving rein to one’s own religious, political or social
convictions and endowing the sacrosanct three-phase system with
tendencies that will bring it exactly to one’s own standpoint. This is,
in effect, making of some formula—say, the “Age of Reason,”
Humanity, the greatest happiness of the greatest number,
enlightenment, economic progress, national freedom, the conquest
of nature, or world-peace—a criterion whereby to judge whole
millennia of history. And so we judge that they were ignorant of the
“true path,” or that they failed to follow it, when the fact is simply that
their will and purposes were not the same as ours. Goethe’s saying,
“What is important in life is life and not a result of life,” is the answer
to any and every senseless attempt to solve the riddle of historical
form by means of a programme.
It is the same picture that we find when we turn to the historians of
each special art or science (and those of national economics and
philosophy as well). We find:
“Painting” from the Egyptians (or the cave-men) to the
Impressionists, or
“Music” from Homer to Bayreuth and beyond, or
“Social Organization” from Lake Dwellings to Socialism, as
the case may
be,
presented as a linear graph which steadily rises in conformity with
the values of the (selected) arguments. No one has seriously
considered the possibility that arts may have an allotted span of life
and may be attached as forms of self-expression to particular
regions and particular types of mankind, and that therefore the total
history of an art may be merely an additive compilation of separate
developments, of special arts, with no bond of union save the name
and some details of craft-technique.
We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and
duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well,
are determined by the properties of its species. No one, looking at
the oak, with its millennial life, dare say that it is at this moment, now,
about to start on its true and proper course. No one as he sees a
caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will go on doing so for two
or three years. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified certainty,
a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the
inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, we
take our ideas as to the course of the future from an unbridled
optimism that sets at naught all historical, i.e., organic, experience,
and everyone therefore sets himself to discover in the accidental
present terms that he can expand into some striking progression-
series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof but on
predilection. He works upon unlimited possibilities—never a natural
end—and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans
artlessly the continuation of his structure.
 “Mankind,” however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than
the family of butterflies or orchids. “Mankind” is a zoological
expression, or an empty word.[17] But conjure away the phantom,
break the magic circle, and at once there emerges an astonishing
wealth of actual forms—the Living with all its immense fullness,
depth and movement—hitherto veiled by a catchword, a dryasdust
scheme, and a set of personal “ideals.” I see, in place of that empty
figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting
one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a
number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength
from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound
throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its
mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own
passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. Here indeed are
colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet
discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods,
landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the stone-pines, the
blossoms, twigs and leaves—but there is no ageing “Mankind.” Each
Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise,
ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one
painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its
deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration
and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar
blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. These
cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb
aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants
and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead
Nature of Newton. I see world-history as a picture of endless
formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and
waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the contrary,
sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one
epoch after another.
But the series “ancient-mediæval-modern history” has at last
exhausted its usefulness. Angular, narrow, shallow though it was as
a scientific foundation, still we possessed no other form that was not
wholly unphilosophical in which our data could be arranged, and
world-history (as hitherto understood) has to thank it for filtering our
classifiable solid residues. But the number of centuries that the
scheme can by any stretch be made to cover has long since been
exceeded, and with the rapid increase in the volume of our historical
material—especially of material that cannot possibly be brought
under the scheme—the picture is beginning to dissolve into a chaotic
blur. Every historical student who is not quite blind knows and feels
this, and it is as a drowning man that he clutches at the only scheme
which he knows of. The word “Middle Age,”[18] invented in 1667 by
Professor Horn of Leyden, has to-day to cover a formless and
constantly extending mass which can only be defined, negatively, as
every thing not classifiable under any pretext in one of the other two
(tolerably well-ordered) groups. We have an excellent example of
this in our feeble treatment and hesitant judgment of modern
Persian, Arabian and Russian history. But, above all, it has become
impossible to conceal the fact that this so-called history of the world
is a limited history, first of the Eastern Mediterranean region and
then,—with an abrupt change of scene at the Migrations (an event
important only to us and therefore greatly exaggerated by us, an
event of purely Western and not even Arabian significance),—of
West-Central Europe. When Hegel declared so naïvely that he
meant to ignore those peoples which did not fit into his scheme of
history, he was only making an honest avowal of methodic
premisses that every historian finds necessary for his purpose and
every historical work shows in its lay-out. In fact it has now become
an affair of scientific tact to determine which of the historical
developments shall be seriously taken into account and which not.
Ranke is a good example.
 VIII
To-day we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and
historians who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance
to us, then, are conceptions and purviews that they put before us as
universally valid, when in truth their furthest horizon does not extend
beyond the intellectual atmosphere of Western Man?
Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato
speaks of humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the
barbarians, which is entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the
Classical life and thought, and his premisses take him to conclusions
that for Greeks were complete and significant. When, however, Kant
philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his
theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so
many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that
goes without saying. In his æsthetics he formulates the principles,
not of Phidias’s art, or Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what
he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary
forms of Western thought, though a glance at Aristotle and his
essentially different conclusions should have sufficed to show that
Aristotle’s intellect, not less penetrating than his own, was of different
structure from it. The categories of the Westerner are just as alien to
Russian thought as those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are
to him. For us, the effective and complete comprehension of
Classical root-words is just as impossible as that of Russian[19] and
Indian, and for the modern Chinese or Arab, with their utterly
different intellectual constitutions, “philosophy from Bacon to Kant”
has only a curiosity-value.
It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in
whom we might have expected to find it—insight into the historically
relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific
existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their
validity; the conviction that his “unshakable” truths and “eternal”
views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty
of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures
have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and
nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future,
and only through an understanding of the living world shall we
understand the symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant,
nothing universal. We must cease to speak of the forms of
“Thought,” the principles of “Tragedy,” the mission of “The State.”
Universal validity involves always the fallacy of arguing from
particular to particular.
But something much more disquieting than a logical fallacy begins
to appear when the centre of gravity of philosophy shifts from the
abstract-systematic to the practical-ethical and our Western thinkers
from Schopenhauer onward turn from the problem of cognition to the
problem of life (the will to life, to power, to action). Here it is not the
ideal abstract “man” of Kant that is subjected to examination, but
actual man as he has inhabited the earth during historical time,
grouped, whether primitive or advanced, by peoples; and it is more
than ever futile to define the structure of his highest ideas in terms of
the “ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme with its local limitations. But
it is done, nevertheless.
Consider the historical horizon of Nietzsche. His conceptions of
decadence, militarism, the transvaluation of all values, the will to
power, lie deep in the essence of Western civilization and are for the
analysis of that civilization of decisive importance. But what, do we
find, was the foundation on which he built up his creation? Romans
and Greeks, Renaissance and European present, with a fleeting and
uncomprehending side-glance at Indian philosophy—in short
“ancient, mediæval and modern” history. Strictly speaking, he never
once moved outside the scheme, not did any other thinker of his
time.
What correlation, then, is there or can there be of his idea of the
“Dionysian” with the inner life of a highly-civilized Chinese or an up-
to-date American? What is the significance of his type of the
“Superman”—for the world of Islam? Can image-forming antitheses
of Nature and Intellect, Heathen and Christian, Classical and
Modern, have any meaning for the soul of the Indian or the Russian?
What can Tolstoi—who from the depths of his humanity rejected the
whole Western world-idea as something alien and distant—do with
the “Middle Ages,” with Dante, with Luther? What can a Japanese do
with Parzeval and “Zarathustra,” or an Indian with Sophocles? And is
the thought-range of Schopenhauer, Comte, Feuerbach, Hebbel or
Strindberg any wider? Is not their whole psychology, for all its
intention of world-wide validity, one of purely West-European
significance?
How comic seem Ibsen’s woman-problems—which also challenge
the attention of all “humanity”—when, for his famous Nora, the lady
of the North-west European city with the horizon that is implied by a
house-rent of £100 to £300 a year and a Protestant upbringing, we
substitute Cæsar’s wife, Madame de Sévigné, a Japanese or a
Turkish peasant woman! But, for that matter, Ibsen’s own circle of
vision is that of the middle class in a great city of yesterday and to-
day. His conflicts, which start from spiritual premisses that did not
exist till about 1850 and can scarcely last beyond 1950, are neither
those of the great world nor those of the lower masses, still less
those of the cities inhabited by non-European populations.
All these are local and temporary values—most of them indeed
limited to the momentary “intelligentsia” of cities of West-European
type. World-historical or “eternal” values they emphatically are not.
Whatever the substantial importance of Ibsen’s and Nietzsche’s
generation may be, it infringes the very meaning of the word “world-
history”—which denotes the totality and not a selected part—to
subordinate, to undervalue, or to ignore the factors which lie outside
“modern” interests. Yet in fact they are so undervalued or ignored to
an amazing extent. What the West has said and thought, hitherto, on
the problems of space, time, motion, number, will, marriage,
property, tragedy, science, has remained narrow and dubious,
because men were always looking for the solution of the question. It
was never seen that many questioners implies many answers, that
any philosophical question is really a veiled desire to get an explicit
affirmation of what is implicit in the question itself, that the great
questions of any period are fluid beyond all conception, and that
therefore it is only by obtaining a group of historically limited
solutions and measuring it by utterly impersonal criteria that the final
secrets can be reached. The real student of mankind treats no
standpoint as absolutely right or absolutely wrong. In the face of
such grave problems as that of Time or that of Marriage, it is
insufficient to appeal to personal experience, or an inner voice, or
reason, or the opinion of ancestors or contemporaries. These may
say what is true for the questioner himself and for his time, but that is
not all. In other Cultures the phenomenon talks a different language,
for other men there are different truths. The thinker must admit the
validity of all, or of none.
How greatly, then, Western world-criticism can be widened and
deepened! How immensely far beyond the innocent relativism of
Nietzsche and his generation one must look—how fine one’s sense
for form and one’s psychological insight must become—how
completely one must free oneself from limitations of self, of practical
interests, of horizon—before one dare assert the pretension to
understand world-history, the world-as-history.
 IX
In opposition to all these arbitrary and narrow schemes, derived
from tradition or personal choice, into which history is forced, I put
forward the natural, the “Copernican,” form of the historical process
which lies deep in the essence of that process and reveals itself only
to an eye perfectly free from prepossessions.
Such an eye was Goethe’s. That which Goethe called Living
Nature is exactly that which we are calling here world-history, world-
as-history. Goethe, who as artist portrayed the life and development,
always the life and development, of his figures, the thing-becoming
and not the thing-become (“Wilhelm Meister” and “Wahrheit und
Dichtung”) hated Mathematics. For him, the world-as-mechanism
stood opposed to the world-as-organism, dead nature to living
nature, law to form. As naturalist, every line he wrote was meant to
display the image of a thing-becoming, the “impressed form” living
and developing. Sympathy, observation, comparison, immediate and
inward certainty, intellectual flair—these were the means whereby he
was enabled to approach the secrets of the phenomenal world in
motion. Now these are the means of historical research—precisely
these and no others. It was this godlike insight that prompted him to
say at the bivouac fire on the evening of the Battle of Valmy: “Here
and now begins a new epoch of world history, and you, gentlemen,
can say that you ‘were there.’” No general, no diplomat, let alone the
philosophers, ever so directly felt history “becoming.” It is the
deepest judgment that any man ever uttered about a great historical
act in the moment of its accomplishment.
And just as he followed out the development of the plant-form from
the leaf, the birth of the vertebrate type, the process of the geological
strata—the Destiny in nature and not the Causality—so here we
shall develop the form-language of human history, its periodic
structure, its organic logic out of the profusion of all the challenging
details.
 In other aspects, mankind is habitually, and rightly, reckoned as
one of the organisms of the earth’s surface. Its physical structure, its
natural functions, the whole phenomenal conception of it, all belong
to a more comprehensive unity. Only in this aspect is it treated
otherwise, despite that deeply-felt relationship of plant destiny and
human destiny which is an eternal theme of all lyrical poetry, and
despite that similarity of human history to that of any other of the
higher life-groups which is the refrain of endless beast-legends,
sagas and fables.
But only bring analogy to bear on this aspect as on the rest, letting
the world of human Cultures intimately and unreservedly work upon
the imagination instead of forcing it into a ready-made scheme. Let
the words youth, growth, maturity, decay—hitherto, and to-day more
than ever, used to express subjective valuations and entirely
personal preferences in sociology, ethics and æsthetics—be taken at
last as objective descriptions of organic states. Set forth the
Classical Culture as a self-contained phenomenon embodying and
expressing the Classical soul, put it beside the Egyptian, the Indian,
the Babylonian, the Chinese and the Western, and determine for
each of these higher individuals what is typical in their surgings and
what is necessary in the riot of incident. And then at last will unfold
itself the picture of world-history that is natural to us, men of the
West, and to us alone.
 X
Our narrower task, then, is primarily to determine, from such a
world-survey, the state of West Europe and America as at the epoch
of 1800-2000—to establish the chronological position of this period
in the ensemble of Western culture-history, its significance as a
chapter that is in one or other guise necessarily found in the
biography of every Culture, and the organic and symbolic meaning of
its political, artistic, intellectual and social expression-forms.
Considered in the spirit of analogy, this period appears as
chronologically parallel—“contemporary” in our special sense—with
the phase of Hellenism, and its present culmination, marked by the
World-War, corresponds with the transition from the Hellenistic to the
Roman age. Rome, with its rigorous realism—uninspired, barbaric,
disciplined, practical, Protestant, Prussian—will always give us,
working as we must by analogies, the key to understanding our own
future. The break of destiny that we express by hyphening the words
“Greeks = Romans” is occurring for us also, separating that which is
already fulfilled from that which is to come. Long ago we might and
should have seen in the “Classical” world a development which is the
complete counterpart of our own Western development, differing
indeed from it in every detail of the surface but entirely similar as
regards the inward power driving the great organism towards its end.
We might have found the constant alter ego of our own actuality in
establishing the correspondence, item by item, from the “Trojan War”
and the Crusades, Homer and the Nibelungenlied, through Doric and
Gothic, Dionysian movement and Renaissance, Polycletus and John
Sebastian Bach, Athens and Paris, Aristotle and Kant, Alexander
and Napoleon, to the world-city and the imperialism common to both
Cultures.
Unfortunately, this requires an interpretation of the picture of
Classical history very different from the incredibly one-sided,
superficial, prejudiced, limited picture that we have in fact given to it.
We have, in truth been only too conscious of our near relation to the
Classical Age, and only too prone in consequence to unconsidered
assertion of it. Superficial similarity is a great snare, and our entire
Classical study fell a victim to it as soon as it passed from the
(admittedly masterly) ordering and critique of the discoveries to the
interpretation of their spiritual meaning. That close inward relation in
which we conceive ourselves to stand towards the Classical, and
which leads us to think that we are its pupils and successors
(whereas in reality we are simply its adorers), is a venerable
prejudice which ought at last to be put aside. The whole religious-
philosophical, art-historical and social-critical work of the 19th
Century has been necessary to enable us, not to understand
Æschylus, Plato, Apollo and Dionysus, the Athenian state and
Cæsarism (which we are far indeed from doing), but to begin to
realize, once and for all, how immeasurably alien and distant these
things are from our inner selves—more alien, maybe, than Mexican
gods and Indian architecture.
Our views of the Græco-Roman Culture have always swung
between two extremes, and our standpoints have invariably been
defined for us by the “ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme. One
group, public men before all else—economists, politicians, jurists—
opine that “present-day mankind” is making excellent progress,
assess it and its performances at the very highest value and
measure everything earlier by its standards. There is no modern
party that has not weighed up Cleon, Marius, Themistocles, Catiline,
the Gracchi, according to its own principles. On the other hand we
have the group of artists, poets, philologists and philosophers. These
feel themselves to be out of their element in the aforesaid present,
and in consequence choose for themselves in this or that past epoch
a standpoint that is in its way just as absolute and dogmatic from
which to condemn “to-day.” The one group looks upon Greece as a
“not yet,” the other upon modernity as a “nevermore.” Both labour
under the obsession of a scheme of history which treats the two
epochs as part of the same straight line.
In this opposition it is the two souls of Faust that express
themselves. The danger of the one group lies in a clever
superficiality. In its hands there remains finally, of all Classical
Culture, of all reflections of the Classical soul, nothing but a bundle
of social, economic, political and physiological facts, and the rest is
treated as “secondary results,” “reflexes,” “attendant phenomena.” In
the books of this group we find not a hint of the mythical force of
Æschylus’s choruses, of the immense mother-earth struggle of the
early sculpture, the Doric column, of the richness of the Apollo-cult,
of the real depth of the Roman Emperor-worship. The other group,
composed above all of belated romanticists—represented in recent
times by the three Basel professors Bachofen, Burckhardt and
Nietzsche—succumb to the usual dangers of ideology. They lose
themselves in the clouds of an antiquity that is really no more than
the image of their own sensibility in a philological mirror. They rest
their case upon the only evidence which they consider worthy to
support it, viz., the relics of the old literature, yet there never was a
Culture so incompletely represented for us by its great writers.[20] The
first group, on the other hand, supports itself principally upon the
humdrum material of law-sources, inscriptions and coins (which
Burckhardt and Nietzsche, very much to their own loss, despised)
and subordinates thereto, often with little or no sense of truth and
fact, the surviving literature. Consequently, even in point of critical
foundations, neither group takes the other seriously. I have never
heard that Nietzsche and Mommsen had the smallest respect for
each other.
But neither group has attained to that higher method of treatment
which reduces this opposition of criteria to ashes, although it was
within their power to do so. In their self-limitation they paid the
penalty for taking over the causality-principle from natural science.
Unconsciously they arrived at a pragmatism that sketchily copied the
world-picture drawn by physics and, instead of revealing, obscured
and confused the quite other-natured forms of history. They had no
better expedient for subjecting the mass of historical material to
critical and normative examination than to consider one complex of
phenomena as being primary and causative and the rest as being
secondary, as being consequences or effects. And it was not only
the matter-of-fact school that resorted to this method. The
romanticists did likewise, for History had not revealed even to their
dreaming gaze its specific logic; and yet they felt that there was an
immanent necessity in it to determine this somehow, rather than turn
their backs upon History in despair like Schopenhauer.