Professor Scott Branting, and the University of Central Florida, are CRANE’s newest partners, and they’re bringing a lot of exciting projects with them. Professor Branting has spent many years adapting tools like remote sensing and 3D modeling for use in archaeology, and he and UCF are in the middle of sending those tools into space. Thanks to what he calls “a very robust partnership” with organizations like NASA, they’re developing mini-satellites that will monitor and photograph cultural heritage sites.
To begin with, though, the CRANE partnership will focus on DATCH (Documenting and Triaging Cultural Heritage), a project to equip archaeologists with “augmented reality” headsets, which will give them all the information they need without ever taking their eyes off a site. “You might be able to eventually look at a tree through your goggles, and have an AI that tells you what sort of tree it is,” Professor Branting says.

Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality headsets let users multi-task; they can see the real world and project information and images on top of it. For now, they mostly display pre-existing content like images and statistics, but someday, Professor Branting says, a user could “detail and draw in what parts are still standing, and what parts have been destroyed,” all without having to leave the scene or use another device.
Augmented reality could also allow archaeologists to communicate with experts remotely. Professor Branting wants to make it possible to let anyone, anywhere, “work through your headset and give you information or ideas about what you’re looking at.”
Professor Branting is hopeful that CRANE, which he considers a pioneer in “experimenting and exploring what can be done with these technologies,” will help make this a reality sooner. He predicts that users will be able to use a headset to see the history of any site they’re looking at.“It could bring up an entire plan of what something looked like before it had been blown up.”
We are thrilled that Professor Branting and UCF have joined CRANE, and we look forward to a long and productive research partnership!
Written by Jaime Weinman (jaimeweinman.com)