A team of National Taiwan University (NTU) computer scientists has embarked on a project that uses virtual-reality (VR) technology to recreate iconic Chinese artworks, including a traditional painting and ancient murals from the Mogao Caves.
The project is a collaboration between the school, the National Palace Museum, China’s Dunhuang Research Academy and private information technology companies, said team head Hung Yi-ping (洪一平), a professor of computer science.
The museum granted the team access to scan Yuan Dynasty painter Chao Meng-fu’s (趙孟頫) masterpiece, Autumn Colors on the Chiao and Hua Mountains (鵲華秋色), Hung said.
Photo: Wu Po-hsuan, Taipei Times
The academy granted access to several murals at Cave No. 61 — the largest of the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang, including the Panorama of Mount Wutai (五台山圖), the Transformation Tableau of the Flower Garland Sutra (華嚴經變) and At the Four Gates (四門出遊), which are estimated to be 1,700 years old, he said.
The artworks are to be scanned and digitally recreated into 3D interactive VR constructs that can be viewed and explored with a head-mounted display and other controls, he said.
The programs for Cave No. 61 murals will allow users to feel as if they are moving freely within the cave’s interior to explore the murals, whereas an actual visitor to the cave can only view the murals from the ground, he said.
Traditional Chinese paintings do not use the realistic style or the perspective method of Western paintings, which makes reproducing a 3D interactive model of The Autumn Colors on the Chiao and Hua Mountains without losing the original’s style or sense of scale a challenge, the team said.
Virtual and augmented-reality technologies have far-reaching implications, university president Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池) said, adding that they would be widely adopted for their educational and medical applications
The school looks forward to more opportunities to work with other institutions to develop the technologies, he said.
When VR technology was invented in the 1990s, it was mainly used for industrial applications because of the unit’s size and cost, museum director of education, exhibition and information service James Lin (林國平) said.
However, the technology has undergone a revolutionary change in recent years, with the size and costs significantly reduced, Lin said.
A modern virtual-reality set can now fit into a family living room, he added.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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