Aleksandra Fostikov The I nstitute of History, Belgrade

1. NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND RECONNAISSANCE HISTORICAL-GEOGRAPHY AND TOPONYMICAL RESEARCH OF TOPLICA “LAND”.PHOTO SESSION IN SOFTWARE PHOTOSYNT Aleksandra Fostikov The Institute of History, Belgrade Stefana Janićijević Mathematical Institute, SASA, Belgrade

2. Toplica “land”. Previous research and today`s conditions • Toplica “land”is located at the south of Serbia, in the region of central Balkan. At some point of time, it probably included also the zupu Reke (Pusta reka). The name of whole area originates from the name of the river, Toplica, which runs through this region. • Previous research and today`s conditions

3. Goals, tasks and research program stages • Making the list of all localities, those with material remains dating between prehistory to the 16th century, as well as ones devastated throughout the history and witnessed today only by local tradition or toponymy. • All localities, known as well as unknown and undefined, will be mapped and their locations will be presented by the positions gathered from GPS and in a digital form through numerous photographs and films and many other ways.

4. No so long ago and still in use is the usual description of the site like: by the tradition the remains of the church/fortress/.. are situating about 2 or 3 km near/south of the/…village X on/under/.. the hill Y in the forest. Without precisely coordinates or the some sort of the guide person who already was on the site, it is very hard to find any remains, if there are any, under vegetation usual old minimum few years and sometime few decades.

5. Because of the exploration`s nature, the whole project is realizing in separate but parallel stages: Preparation stage: • Fabrication of a detailed research program for each expedition • Study of existing sources and literature Terrain exploration: • Terrain reconnaissance (field survey) • Historical-geography terrain research • Gathering of toponyms in the area • Doing GPS • Education of the younger researchers in the field of the terrain`s survey methodology Assembling results: • Systematization, classification, data processing, digitization • Research results report • Establishment of relevant base • Creating maps • GIS and HGIS (Historical Geographic Information System)

6. Use and application of the research • creation of the historical map of Toplica • better comprehension of the history of Toplica “land” and region • improve education of younger researchers • application in a cultural, political and touristic domain

7. Microsoft Photosynthhttp://labs.live.com/photosynthwww.photosynth.net

8. History • Research team on Photo Tourism from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research • Use of photogrammetry • Collaborationof the Seadragon technology: enables the fast, smooth delivery of the hundreds of images that Photosynth required; deliver just the pixels are needed exactly when user needs them. It allows user to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100 mega pixel photos, without fiddling and waiting around for everything to load

9. Technical issues • Acquires photos, combines them together, and restructure a 3D scene out of them that anyone can view and move around in • If you have reached bright effect, you would need a huge collection of photographs • Final appearance is panorama look, similarly as in Photoshop or ARC3D WS or Bundler MR • Program processes scenes for every point, thus impression is 3D model of picture • It is possible to stop model, move around, and zoom in to check out the smallest details and to look at a photo gallery and immediately see the spatial relation between the photos.

10. + and - • +: a viewer for downloading and navigating complex visual spaces and a "synther" for creating them in the first place; reconstructing the 3D world from flat photographs; • -: necessary to prepare very high number of photographs, with lot of similar details, thus navigation could work properly; no specify explanation for every photo, but only for the whole group; upload speed is providing a greasy picture for a certain time (when standard is 2 Mbit/s); presentation is only on line, user needs to have Internet connection and the format of saving is unknown; importing/exporting of a document is not possible; risk for the data protection is very high, while upload of data has been produced only on a Microsoft server;complex structures, areas of uniformity, shiny objects and exact repetition are problem for synthy;

11. Creating a Photosynth • Take overlapping panoramas from different locations • Have lots of overlap between shots to get good matching • Limit the angles between photos (no more than 25 degrees – at least 15 per full rotation) • Pick scenes or objects with lots of detail and texture • Don’t crop images before synthing • Rotate photos to be ‘up’ correctly before synthing

12. Recommended configuration • High-speed internet connection • Only Windows XP (SP2 or SP3), Windows Vista, and Windows 7 are supported at this time, Boot Camp and some VM configurations • 2 GHz+ recommended. Quad-Core is ideal • 256MB minimum; 1GB+ is recommended • Maximal size of the synth: up to 20GB • Example: upload has been running about 30 minutes, for 18 photographs, resolution of pictures was 3000x2000 px and 512 Kbit/s. Optimal dimension of the photos would be 1024x768 px. Testing of the Photosynth was at the computer with 2GB memory and processor with 1,6GHz

19. THANKS!! Research team: Aleksandra Fostikov aleks.fostikov@gmail.com And Stefana Janicijevic stefana@mi.sanu.ac.rs