Saturday Trivia

The world has been sadly short of archaeological trivia recently, but here's are some bits of forthcoming "virtual" wizadry from the world of technology, that might interest and/or amuse:

Virtual archaeology on the move
http://tinyurl.com/jt4mn (istresults.cordis.europa.eu)
"An Italian-led research project is developing a service that allows visitors to use their camera-equipped 3G mobile telephones to get a personalised multimedia guide to archaeological sites and museums. A tour of a big outdoor cultural site can sometimes be a frustrating experience if objects are not easily located, identified or placed in historical context. The Agamemnon project is working on an interactive multimedia system that provides relevant text, videos, speech and pictures with 3D reconstructions, to visitors' mobile telephones."

Virtual historical worlds
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/521212/

"Computer technology brings ancient worlds to life, but archaeologists debate whether it resembles long-ago reality or reality TV. Jeffrey Clark, Ph.D., director of the Archaeology Technologies Laboratory at North Dakota State University, Fargo, notes the technology that creates such virtual worlds allows people to explore historical locations in a unique way. At the same time, virtual models of past places and the artifacts found there may portray facts bolstered with assumptions. Clark’s comments are among those featured in the article “Digital Digs” in a recent issue of Nature."

See the above article for the full story. Details of the Nature issue which contains the paper upon which the article is based can be found at:

http://www.nature.com/index.html