The development of a collaborative virtual environment for 3D reconstruction of cuneiform tablets

Abstract

The efficient reconstruction of ancient cuneiform tablets has been a challenging problem over many decades, which if an approach is found to speed up the rate of potential fragment joins, will lead to a discovery of rich historical records of knowledge inscribed 5,000 years ago. This paper describes The Leverhulme Trust funded development of a crowd-sourcing collaborative virtual environment via the identification of cooperative personalities. We conducted experiments in which 12 groups of 3 participants collaborated to reconstruct fragments in a laboratory 3D puzzle virtual environment. Personality types were analysed together with NASA TLX workloads and task performance. We discovered that patterns exist for each of the virtual interaction modalities, demonstrating a potential for profiling systems to group personality types for maximising the effective reconstruction of cuneiform fragments.