Futuristic History results seminar in Helsinki

The Futuristic History project organized a public seminar at The National Museum of Finland in Helsinki. Audience of approximately 100 academic, business, culture and museum oriented people were given feature talks by the project partners and presentations by the researchers about the findings and pilot applications developed during the project.

The event was opened by the talk of Vesa Hongisto from Finland’s National Board of Antiquities. He spoke about the exciting new possibilities new technology provides for museums and the research of history in general. The archaeological work behind the Holy Ghost Church application was presented by adjunct professor Kari Uotila.

As a presentative of The Museum Centre of Turku, the organization operating the Luostarinmäki Handicrafts museum, team leader Olli-Pekka Leskinen shared his experiences and thoughts on mixed reality applications as a part of the museum experience. The game business was also in present as Hannu Vuola from Serious Games Finland gave a presentation about the realities of serious games industry. He sees that the mixed reality applications will be big in the future as they become more attractive for the mainstream audiences. The pilot applications by University of Turku were presented by Lauri Viinikkala from the Department of Finnish History and Timo Korkalainen from DFT.

Kari Rainio from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland presented their augmented reality applications created as part of the Futuristic History project: A museum guide for the Luostarinmäki Handicrafts museum, AR application of the old Turku cityscape and a visualization of the old tower of the Turku Cathedral.

At the end of the event the participants were introduced to all the applications in a demonstration session.

The project comes to a conclusion at the end of the year and the research on mixed reality in culture and learning environments continues in a new project, MIRACLE, from the beginning of the next year.