From viewsheds to X-sheds : remediating historical experience through immersive environments

• Main Authors: Sum, Hedren, Whiteman, Stephen
• Other Authors: School of Art, Design and Media
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Library and information science::General; Humanities::General; Digital Art History; 3D Modelling and Reconstruction
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/153072
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Scenes, or jing 景, are the basic building blocks in the mediation of cultural landscapes in China. While scholars have discussed the ideas of jing in writing, their work, though valuable, falls short in capturing the experience it aims to describe and analyse. 3D modelling methods have been widely used to research and present historical objects for decades, yet most models focus on the visualisation, simulation, and rendering of static objects and structures, often separated from their surrounding environment. ‘X-Sheds’ extends the capabilities of digital 3D models and GIS to provide an alternative to textual description and analysis in remediating experiences in historical landscapes and environments for scholarly and popular audiences. This paper introduces the concept X-Sheds, which was born out of ‘The Virtual Mountain Estate’ (VME), a collaboration between Hedren Sum, Stephen Whiteman, and Biju Dhanapalan organised as part of the 2018–2019 workshop, ‘Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D and (Geo)Spatial Networks’.