TBA / Construction Ongoing
PROVISIONAL TEXT BELOW
Gaussian Splatting Overview
Data Sets and Processing
Data sets acquired comprise several hundred gigabytes of spatial capture and computed digital reconstructions of sporting memorials from across the Olympic Precinct, Lakeside Stadium,, various sites across Melbourne, and of smaller scale ephemera and mass produced objects created for the 1956 Olympic Games.
These were processed using various established and emerging research software to textured polygonal meshes (conventional reference representation for 3d data), Neural Radiance Field (NeRF, technique published 2022), and Gaussian Solar (technique published 2023).
These sets afford the capacity for digital humanities teaching and learning, and area of a acute interest in the period of the pandemic.
The source imagery was acquired and curated with its full embedded metadata, and conditions of acquisition, allowing continuous reprocessing as more advanced techniques for visualisation emerge.
Multiple imaging devices were used, in multiple lighting conditions. JPEG full resolution and selective DNG capture.
Imaging data
1.Sony RX100, 1' CMOS BSI sensor, f/1.8 maximum aperture variable zoom lens, image properties recorded in EXIF
2. Fujifilm XM1 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera, APSC sensor, X-Trans colour filter array, XF27 27mm f/2.8 prime lens, EXIF data per image
3. Lumix GX850 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera, M4/3 CMOS sensor, Lumix PL14 14mm f/2.4 wide angle prime lens
4. Pixel 2, 1/2.3' BSI CMOS, f/1.8 lens, with embedded computational camera software, EXIF data per image
5. Pixel 7 Pro, 1/1.3' BSI CMOS, f/1.7 lens, Quad Bayer pattern filter array, embedded computational camera software, EXIF data per image
6. Sony Xperia 1 II, 1/1.7' BSI CMOS fast read out sensor, EXIF data per image
7. Pixel 8, 1/1.3' BSI CMOS, f/1.6 lens, Quad Bayer pattern filter array, embedded computation camera software, EXIF data per image
Processing of output reconstructions
Processing of intermediate structure from motion and camera pose data, and mesh reconstruction, was undertaken on a variety of hardware, principally:
i7-3770, 24GB DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA GTX 1650S 4GB GDDR6 VRAM
i7-4790, 32GB DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA GTX 1650 LP 4GB GDDR5 VRAM
i7-9750h, 32GB DDR4 RAM, NVIDIA RTX2060 Mobile 6GB GDDR6 VRAM
Owing to its more demanding requirements, NeRF and Gaussian Splatting reconstruction was undertaken on two computers:
i7-11700, 64GB DDR4 3200, NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB GDDR6 VRAM
i7-12700h, 32GB DDR4 3200, NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti Mobile 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
All machines were running updated Windows 10 and 11 operating systems, and the then most current graphics driver releases.
Experimental and pending
Some 3d stereoscopic video capture was undertaken with a Vuze Virtual Reality camera and HumanEyes Proprietary stitching software; constituent video perspectives and final integrated stereoscopic 360 video are included.
Future Avenues for Digital Humanities and Sporting Idealism
A new and underutilized means for education and reflection on the moral claims of sport
Aligned to Olympic 2020 + 5, Recommendation 8: Grow digital engagement with people; and responsive to 2020 + 5, on ‘solidarity’ and ‘digitalization.’
Extending Conventional Memorials Via Digital Techniques
Statues to sporting icons are amongst the most common type of public installation, alongside memorials to war, and to national political and civic heroes. Emergent developments in digital volumetric displays, telepresence, and low-cost, online, interactive 3d platforms afford capacity for the inherently local quality of a memorial to be stitched into more global dialogue and engagement.
While generally these statues correspond to virtuosity in competition, there are striking and impressively effective memorials devoted to virtues that extend beyond competition. The spatial legacy of Olympic Games is, understandably, focussed on iconic performances – and early organizational founders. Complementing this spatial legacy with some reflection on the moral legacy, good and ill, would be a meaningful renovation. This is especially so given the explosive salience of statues and public history in recent years. Bitter contests around Confederate monuments in the United States, and national debates in many countries, around racism, colonialism, and slavery, have been a striking development in the repertoire of activism. Gross underrepresentation of women in Australian memorials has elevated the lasting impact of ideas and attitudes when inscribed onto public space. The Olympic movement can pioneer a new model of memorialization - one in which it reflects on its history in a non-triumphalist manner, and in a way that inscribes on the landscape a recognition of its failures as well as its successes. Olympic Arts programs could be engaged in the formulation of these memorialization strategies, along with NGOs, families and descendants.
Such an endeavour would also serve as prophylaxis against the tendency to retrospectively coopt protest to bolster the moral credentials of sport, the notion that the Olympics were always 'on the right side of history'. Explicit acknowledgment of past failures builds credibility, and invites organisational introspection. It almost certainly encourages more thoughtful decision making on how to confront present day political challenges. Such memorialization need not be limited to conventional sculpture. The William Barak bridge, which has become a key element of AFL ceremony for the enhanced recognition of Indigenous Australian contribution to the game, is an excellent example of the ways in which a spatial memorial can contribute to education.1
A comparatively low-cost extension of pre-existing legacy programs could invest in the commission and construction of memorials to figures who embodied an ideal that extended beyond sport, or recognition to historical failures and grave misjudgments by the Olympic movement. For instance, Keba M'Baye, the eminent international human rights law, and pioneer of many key solidarity rights, was properly recognised by the IOC with honorary status.2 Given that key figures of Olympic heritage have been memorialized in statue, adding a figure who represents a kind of cross-over between Geneva and Lausanne would be a wonderful gesture, and a clear opportunity to commission Senegalese artists two create twinned or trilateral installations as part of Legacy, Development, and Arts strands of the Olympic framework. A scholarship, and/or memorial lecture, held in a rotational fashion would be a way of adding a symbolic nucleus to the raft of UN-IOC, activist, and academic components of human rights activity that are presently operational. Equally, there is much value in moving beyond the celebratory mode of spatial memorialization, into a more reflective mode. The inequities of previous gender testing regimes, for instance, would be a worthy subject to memorialize - serving as both as a small gesture of symbolic atonement and gentle public educational purpose.
Contemporary technology also affords ways in which the statue and the memorial need not be limited to a purely local audience. This project has explored low-cost, high fidelity, 3d reconstruction and display of sporting monuments. Techniques allowing virtual annotation and comment from around the world, or even digital transposition of sculptures to new sites, are straightforward and mature, using commodity consumer devices such as the smartphone. The impact and potential for new engagement with the inherently global spatial heritage of the Olympic Games is a new avenue with much promise.
Embracing electronic media and advancements in restoration and remastering of historical audio-visual content as an opportunity to add new perspective
Truly peerless collection of historical audio-visual media, inclusive of both competition footage, but also the official Olympic films. Many of these are celebrated works in their own right, as well as being superb encapsulations of their respective historical moments. Experimental application of emergent techniques of machine learning and neural network enhancement of the fidelity of historical materials has shown great promise. A systematic project of revisiting the collected audio-visual record with these techniques would provide an opportunity to include layers of new commentary - incorporating both activist voices and historians, alongside the original audio tracks. The past would be revisited with the technologies of the present, but also, the perspectives of the present - on successes, and failings. Contemporary protest and contexts could be similarly incorporated, restoring the voices that were marginalised during the event.
Interactive media and educational games
From their modern rebirth at the end of the nineteenth century, the Olympic Games have claimed to be about more than sporting competition. Sport itself, in both national and local forms, and international contests, have invariably declared that physical contest was attached to a wider set of virtues. In junior and school-based physical education, sport and physical activity is almost never about the performance itself. Many of the values proclaimed by sport have changed over time. Some have remained consistent - ideas of fairness, health, peaceful competition, and the development of particular qualities desirable for the ideal citizen. Even if the meaning of what is ideal have changed, the vision that sport advanced ideals has been remarkably consistent.
Yet sport has often disavowed any effort to advance ideals by athletes and activists. The contradiction, whereby sport claims to be about more than competition, and at the same time, seeks to exclude efforts to advance some of those ideals, or new ideals, has been a consistent feature of the modern age. A common complaint against athlete protests and the engagement of social issues is that such actions are 'political.'
As a result, struggles to advance and secure new ideals, on equality, democratic freedom, and environmental justice have often collided with sporting competition. These collisions became more spectacular in the decades after WWII, as organisations like the United Nations established new ideals - foremost the concept of human rights, and as Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and social movements fought against racial and gender discrimination. These ideals were often close to the kinds of claims made by sport, making it a natural place to seek change - to make the competition live up to its moral promises.
Digitalization and solidarity of human experience of sport
Physiologic archive of the Olympics
Wearable training and race performance data is increasingly a mainstay of recreational, and elite, athletes. The author, for instance, has two decades of running and heart rate records, for almost every single run and race. For the past fifteen years, that archive includes stride and GPS information, and altitude. It has corresponding notes and reflections on each day, and the experience of the run; this is a common approach amongst enthusiastic state and national level athletes in many countries.
While highly sensitive and not feasible to disclose within a career, retention and invitation to share this record, alongside oral history, and spatial reconstruction of key local training routes, would afford a unique synthesis of the corporeal and remembered narrative.3
So many of the training venues of elite athletes are central to the construction of their place as icons of the sport. One the author's key local training venues, for much of his life, is Central Park Malvern, inclusive of the Landy Oval. Currently marked by a small plaque to former Governor John Landy, former world record holder in the mile, it was the site in which he training at night, after work as an accountant. British athlete Ron Hill has a meticulous record of his training history, recorded by hand. Multiple gold medalist, and perhaps the most celebrated distance runner in Olympic history, Haile Gebreselassie, had the history of his running route registered in an almost spectral fashion - a slight asymmetry in his form - the faint trace of the arm under which he carried his books on the run to school. Paavo Nurmi, and Robert decastella, have noted forest sections in their respective counties.
At a surface layer, encountering elite physiologic data produces a sense of awe - but when coupled with accounts of the struggles of particular days, the nature of the place, these afford a kind of distributed, digital sense of a shared activity. Community athletes, while perhaps initially marveling at the absolute metrics apparent in the data, will gain a sense in which fundamental aspects of the activity are shared across continents, and that disappointments, injury, and resilience are also substrates of physical competition.
Presumptively, a prolonged embargo period would be required, given the sensitivity, and potential indirect revelation of competition sensitive training information, which may have some degree of proprietary restriction. Nevertheless, the era of digitalized, wearable, archiving of this kind of corporeal narrative began in the early 1990s - and with three decades of evolution in elite training practice, any serious competition sensitivity has almost certainly perished. Foremost, even if any actual public release of the data has a decade of embargo from retirement, seeking to begin the process of preservation, and collection of oral histories, seems highly prudent, given the well described deficits in archival practice with regards to electronic data.
A project which draws on funding and technical support from key device and software manufacturers, Polar, the pioneer in athletic heart rate monitoring, Garmin, and Strava would be an obvious avenue, along with, potentially, commercial satellite imagery providers, who now have approximately twenty years of metre-scale and below geospatial data. Key engagement and artistic projects drawing on the data, particularly in terms of its reprojection on the original spaces covered in the journey to a handful of moments of global prominence at an Olympiad would be an excellent opportunity for stitching local community health and sport programs into the often rarefied world of Olympic competitors.
- For precis, see William Barak, available at https://www.firstpeoplesrelations.vic.gov.au/william-barak accessed 1 June 2024. ↩︎
- IOC Press Release, ‘Death of Judge Kéba Mbaye, IOC Honorary Member since 2002,’ 12 January 2007, available at https://olympics.com/ioc/news/death-of-judge-keba-mbaye-ioc-honorary-member-since-2002 accessed 10 September 2023. ↩︎
- For a pioneering example of this kind of use of training data, with athlete agency and artistic collaboration, see Jack Latimore, ‘It’s me in that moment’: Adam Goodes transforms footy career into intimate artwork,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 19 August 2022, available at https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/it-s-me-in-that-moment-adam-goodes-transforms-footy-career-into-intimate-artwork-20220816-p5bafi.html accessed 10 September 2023. ↩︎