The Powerhouse Research Fellowship
February – November 2021
Project Title: Mixed Reality Enabled Storytelling
The aim of Dr Tomasz Bednarz’s project is to design new technology for Mixed Reality Enabled Storytelling (MRES). Specific to the Australian science environment, the project will investigate and evaluate the efficacy of using modern digital platforms for gamifying technology and science, to communicate through spatially design storytelling. The platform delivered by this project will allow personalised real-time content generation, building narrative details and stories replay. The platform will also enable remote collaboration, allowing to carry out remote immersive sessions with internal and external Powerhouse audiences.
During the research fellowship, Bednarz will be working with the museum (and also collaborate with ANSTO) to understand number and types of digital assets produced during physics-driven processes, such as ancient artefacts age estimation using non-invasive neuron imaging, computed tomography volumetrics. He will also focus on stories around the objects themselves, to recreate various scenarios in real-time that can be presented visually during the exhibition, and assisted using NLP and AI, real-time computer graphics and a variety of AR/VR platforms. This collaboration will also lead to the development of new grant proposals.
Dr Tomasz Bednarz is a Team Leader (Visual Analytics) at the CSIRO’s Data61, and leads Simulation and Modelling Cross-Cutting Capability, for CSIRO’s Future Science and Technology. He is also a Director of UNSW’s Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre (EPICentre).Bednarz completed undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Physics and Applied Computer Science at the AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland. He completed his doctoral degree in Interdisciplinary Engineering Sciences at the Kyushu University, Japan; and received MBA (Technology) from the AGSM (UNSW), Australia. He holds Adjunct Associate Professor position at the University of South Australia (School of IT and Math Sciences).
His current roles reflect his conviction to a holistic approach to the wicked problems facing the collation, analytics, computing and display of big data. His approach is expansive and encompasses the use of novel technologies (AR, VR, CAVE, Dome, AVIE), often in combination. Over the last couple of years, he has been involved in a wide range of projects in areas of immersive visualisation, human[en dash]computer interaction, computational imaging, image analysis and processing, visualisation, simulations, computer graphics, computer games, computational fluid dynamics, cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and multi-sensors assimilation.
In 2019, he was Conference Chair of ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2019.