This section provides more detailed information on the projects objectives, concepts and developments. Throughout this page you will be able to find multiple linked documents that have been produced during the project.

Strategic objectives

The main objective of DHX is to develop a Virtual Guidance System for Exploring Heritage by means of Immersive and Interactive presentations. The consortium has developed innovative solutions for creating and sharing tours through ecological and cultural content, including data acquisition methods using computer vision techniques, software tools for the management and creation of content into interactive tours, and affordable interactive and immersive presentation systems.
This section describes the particular objectives, with methods and actions for their development and dissemination (marketing) to the target groups. Specifically involved groups of external partners or target organizations aren mentioned. General concertation meetings as performed throughout the project with numerous museums and organizations are not mentioned particularly.

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This section introduces the different aspects of the project. If you are interested in more details, please also visit the project outline section.

What is DHX ?
DHX stands for Digital Artistic and Ecological Heritage Exchange, a research project, funded by the European Union. We aim at developing a virtual platform for museums to create, display and share cultural content with each other.
The DHX platform is a new way to present cultural and natural heritage from all over the world. The visitor is given the opportunity to experience a variety of contents inside an attractive three-dimensional immersive virtual reality environment.
Virtual reality technology allows the reconstruction and deployment of artifacts far in space and time: Along a virtual tour the visitor feels the presence of inaccessible objects and environments or gains access to additional layers of information that complements an existing exhibition.

Benefits

The benefit for museums and natural parks

DHX offers a new solution for disseminating cultural and natural heritage that is very attractive to the public
DHX content can be individually created for the local institution. It becomes part of an open network thus being available to other partners and disseminating to a potentially huge number of visitors. Expert knowledge can be included on-line by means of telepresence. Already available content can be customized according to each institution’s requirements
DHX deepens the understanding of cultural and ecological heritage by providing additional information that adapts to the visitors level of interest. Interactive elements and virtual storytelling appeal to the visitor and arouses deeper interest for the topic
DHX technology is a new chance to enhance intercultural exchange at a transcontinental level by means of broadband communication between remotely located systems

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The Social Network of Human Diseases

Director: Dr. Kristian Kersting, Fraunhofer IAIS What do diabetes mellitus and overweight have in common? For expert in health, this is an easy question. But would you as a non-expert know it? Maybe. So do you know what Cholera and Shigellosis do have in common? Most likely not. Indeed, The Necessary medical information is available to you on the world wide web, but not in a form that is easy to understand. Therefore, we will illustrate how to draw the big picture of diseases, based on a database summarizing correlations Obtained from the disease history of more than 30 million patients. This will be a Phenotypic Disease Network (PDN) – the social network of diseases. This big picture Will Provide an easy way to navigate within the world of human diseases and discover hidden connections. More technically, we will deal with the problems of computing a PageRank and retrieving of diseases from a cluster, given just a few diseases from that cluster only. Precondition You need advanced experience in programming (especially Python), and mathematics. Furthermore, you should be interested in health and new web technologies and enjoy speaking English, as this will be the spoken language of the workshop.

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The DHX (Digital Ecological and Artistic Heritage Exchange) project aims to establish a networked virtual reality infrastructure and content development environment for museums and cyber theatres, for mutual exchange of digital cultural and natural heritage. European and Asian partners are participating for transcontinental shared immersive experience in a global scale using high-bandwidth trans Euro-Asian networks.

This website is a repository for a wide variety of material regarding the DHX project, including detailed descriptions of project workpackages and interesting material for end users. Please feel free to scroll around, and if you have any questions, contact us!

DHX is a cooperation between Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, RMH New Media GMBH, the University of Crete, Barco n.v., University of Milano, and Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche. DHX is funded jointly by the EU (IST – 2001 – 33476) and Korea (MIC 2001-S-097 and KIST 2E17762).

Public media appearance

TV appearance in Q21 (WDR, third German TV channel), Mai 5, 2004
Virtuelle Reisen: Einmal Kreta und Zurueck in 15 Minuten. Focus, nr.23, 3.Juni 2002, pp. 150.

Scientific publications

General publications

Kruijff, E., Severin, I. Transcontinental guidance and exploration of digital cultural heritage (DHX). In proceedings of CIDOC/ADIT 2003, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, 2003.
Goebel, M., Kruijff, E., Mostafawy, S. Storytelling in Virtual Environments – edutainment in Digital Heritage Exchange (DHX) scenarios. Workshop at the 8th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM), 2002, Gyeongju, Korea.
Publications on affordable systems

Matveyev S., Simon A.Virtual Environment on Personal Computers – Affordable Solution for Virtual Museum World. In proceedings of CIDOC/ADIT 2003, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, 2003.
Publications on Storytelling and Guidance mechanisms

E. Kruijff, S. Conrad, P. Palamidese, P. Mazzoleni, F. Hasenbrink, M. Suttrop, Y. Kwon. Remote Virtual Guidance in Immersive Museum Applications. VSMM2004, Gifu, Japan, 2004.
Conrad, S., Kruijff, E., Suttrop, M., Hasenbrink, F., Lechner, A. A Storytelling Concept for Digital Heritage Exchange in Virtual Environments. In proceedings of Virtual Storytelling 2003, Toulouse, France, 2003.

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