Digitally preserving Vietnamese relics

Koreans help restore site in Vietnam

HUE, Vietnam ― The summer sun heated the air up to 45 degrees Celsius (113F) recently as a group of young Koreans busily took pictures of a large, deteriorating building. The heat also continued to take its slow toll on the structure, which sported peeling paint and rotting wood beneath its yellow-tiled roof.
The Throne Palace is one of the few buildings standing today within Hue, the Imperial City, which served as capital of Vietnam from 1802 to 1945 and as home to the emperor and royal family. Eighty percent of the Imperial City grounds have been destroyed by foreign attacks in various wars. Today, only a few buildings remain, still bearing the scars of conflict.
The city of Hue has been designated as a World Cultural Heritage site, but a lack of monetary and human resources are delaying the professional preservation of the existing structures, let alone the restoration of the demolished ones.
Park Jin-ho, a researcher at the Graduate School of Culture and Technology of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and his teammates have been working to digitally preserve the site. The 11 team members include a mix of scientists, technicians and a photographer.
They are also cultural envoys, as this is the first project that the Korean government has undertaken to help preserve cultural relics in foreign countries.
The project is mainly being funded by the Cultural Heritage Foundation, which provided 100 million won ($106,000). Kaist provided 20 million won, but the money does not include the expensive equipment the team is using, such as digital 3D scanners. The project is also supported by the Korean National Commission for Unesco.
The team is basically taking both two- and three-dimensional images of the site and reconstructing the building in a three-dimensional format.
“We’re rebuilding the building in a virtual space,” said Ahn Jae-hong, one of the Kaist researchers working on the project.
There is plenty of work to do.
In 1968 American forces bombed the area when North Vietnamese troops had taken over the citadel; the monuments were also destroyed by the French in 1947 and various battles in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the Vietnamese rose up against France, then its colonial ruler. The structures that survived were weathered by typhoons, floods and other natural disasters.
“This is a new kind of diplomatic approach ― a cultural one, which makes it very high on the strategic ladder of international exchanges,” said Kim Kui-bae, an official at the Korean National Commission for Unesco. This local body for Unesco suggested the Vietnamese site to the government.
“It is very meaningful because Vietnam and Korea have a strong his-toric relationship,” Kim said. “Also, we don’t think of this project as a charity to help developing countries. It is part of the greater global initiative to restore cultural relics, which are an important asset for everyone.”
Ahn, of the Kaist team, agreed.
“In the past, the foreign support offered by Korea was mainly medical work or building social infrastructure, such as roads. But since Korea is strong in information technology, we are now trying to reach out with the technological edge we have,” Ahn said.
The Vietnam-run Hue Monuments Conservation Center has offered its support, allowing the Korean team to work around-the-clock on the site, giving them full access to restricted areas. The center is also providing the team with past documents and maps to help with the digital reconstruction.
This project is not part of a $70 million, 15-year project the Vietnamese government launched in 1996 to restore some of the main structures, but since restoration efforts have only just begun, the digital documentation of the site and cyber rendering of the demolished buildings will assist future restoration efforts, an HMCC spokeswoman said.
The Korean team plans to visit the site two more times this year and they hope to finish the project by December.
When the digital rendering is complete, the Koreans will set up an installation at the actual site, with huge monitors.
Visitors will then be able to see what the building looked like in 2007 and what it looked like in its prime.
The Kaist team is now working on recomposing the digital images.
“People will be able to see what the site looked like through projectors and screens, which will give them an idea of the splendor of the past,” said Ahn Mi-hye, a researcher at Kaist’s digital media contents lab and the only woman on the team. “The field work was extremely exhausting because of the heat, but it is fulfilling to be working on a project that has a special purpose.”

By Wohn Dong-hee
Staff Writer for JoongAng Daily

Don’t get mad, get freeware and get even

It’s been quite a while since the Internet became the unofficial agora of the 21st century, but Web users are now expressing themselves on cyberspace through more than just text ― games have become the new way to rave, rant or simply poke fun at public figures.
Some Koreans adept at flash animation have started creating simple games about hot issues. These games are being uploaded on portals for games, video clips and flash animation, such as Flash 365.
For example, last Tuesday, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited the Yasukuni Shrine to pay homage to Japanese war dead. Koreans were furious, since the day marks Japan’s surrender in World War II, which Korea celebrates as Liberation Day. No Japanese prime minister had visited the shrine on Aug. 15 since 1985.
While thousands of protesters took to the streets in downtown Seoul to stage rallies that day, tens of thousands flocked to the Internet to play games that involved a variety of stress-relieving actions one could take out on Mr. Koizumi. One crudely-designed game was a variation of an old brick-breaking game, only the bricks were replaced with Koizumi heads. Another game involves kicking Mr. Koizumi’s head across the ocean, which is dotted with buoys. The point is to try to get the prime minister’s head on the buoys, so that it bounces back up and doesn’t fall into the water. This game wasn’t created in Korea, but its popularity among Chinese hints at its origins.
Another game based on a popular social topic these days is the “doenjang girl” game; doenjang means “bean paste,” and a bean-paste girl is one without a lick of common sense. Created by a 20-year old man using flash animation, one clicks through a story, selecting between two choices, which leads to the next turn in the story. The object of the game is to become a “doenjang girl,” and wheedle men in buying you lavish luxury goods. Those who win know to always pick the miniskirt from the closet instead of the jeans.
Since these games are freeware, they can be copied and pasted or linked to one’s blog, an indicator of what social topics people are interested in at the time. Last month, at the end of the World Cup, games featuring the French player Zinadine Zidane head-butting opponents were extremely popular.
People also post messages beneath the games on the portal sites, saying what they think about them ― a new form of digital public opinion.

by Wohn Dong-hee

The hottest sports action in Korea is computerized

Some of the hottest sporting action this summer is taking place on computer screens. Crowds of thousands lined the beaches in Busan and Seoul’s Olympic Park recently for separate computer gaming events.
E-sports is more than a kid’s game ― it is a 100 billion won ($107 million) market in Korea, and it nearly doubles in size every year.
At Olympic Park in southern Seoul, the Seoul International e-Sports Festival ended a four-day event yesterday amid game character fashion shows, concerts and other events.
The festival also included the finals of a 256-team “StarCraft” single-elimination tournament offering a cash prize of 20 million won. The winner of a single-player “WarCraft 3” competition got $20,000. About 50 gamers from numerous countries, including China, Poland and Sweden, participated.
Although many of the participants were professional Korean gamers, international teams came out strong in the shooting game “Counter-Strike.”

	In Seoul, gamers compete this past weekend. Provided by the organizations

The Seoul City government said next year it expects some 200,000 people for the event; the entire event was broadcast live on the Internet video portal GomTV.
Also part of the e-sports festival, the 2007 Korea Pump Festival drew huge crowds of people who wanted to see contestants dance.
“Pump” is a Korean-developed game similar to “Dance Dance Revolution,” where players have to step on pads on the floor as directed by arrows that appear on the screen. At yet another venue, digital avatars danced away in a competition for the game “Audition,” where cyber figures do the actual bodywork.
The Seoul festivities were just one of the many summer computer game festivals going on nationwide this summer.
On Aug. 4, Busan’s Gwangalli beach was packed with people watching the finals of the Shinhan Pro League, one of the biggest StarCraft tournaments in Korea.
The event attracts tens of thousands of spectators each year.
Prior to Busan, e-sports festivals also took place in the city of Daegu, in the mountainous region of Gangwon and at the Gyeongpo Beach in Gangneung City in Gangwon ― all drawing big crowds.
“I heard that e-sports will be a pilot category for the Beijing Olympics,” said Ma Jae-yoon, a top Korean StarCraft player. “It motivates me to play harder.”

By Wohn Dong-hee
Staff Writer for JoongAng Daily

Harvard team explains Hwang’s stem cell fraud

For the first time, a Harvard science team led by Korean scientists proved that Hwang’s NT-1 stem cell was achieved by parthenogenesis, not somatic stem cell transfer. Hwang has maintained that the stem cell was created through the latter procedure.
In the September issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell, a team of scientists led by Kim Kitai of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, said that they developed a method of distinguishing whether or not embryonic stem cells were achieved by parthenogenesis or somatic cell nuclear transfer.
Parthenogenesis refers to the development of an embryo that has not been fertilized by a male. Although this occurs naturally in some species such as lower plants and invertebrates, it can also occur by artificially activating oocytes without fertilization. Somatic cell nuclear transfer refers to the growing of a cell by removing the nucleus from a regular, or somatic cell. The nucleus is then injected into an ovum, which does not then need to be fertilized.
According to the article, the scientists used DNA fingerprint analysis of nuclear donor cells and analysis of gene patterns among other things, to prove which stem cells were from parthenogenesis and which from somatic cell nuclear transfer.
Although there had been previous successes in somatic cell nuclear transfer, such as Dolly the sheep, Hwang made a sensation in 2004 when he said that he achieved the process with a human embryo. His research results were published in the journal Science, but were later retracted because of research misconduct and forged data that was used in the paper. Hwang was eventually fired from his position as professor at Seoul National University.
When prosecutors began Hwang’s case two years ago, they focused only on fund embezzlement and bioethics violations, saying it was up to the science community to figure out the “truth” behind the stem cells.
According to the September article in Cell Stem Cell, Hwang did create the first human stem cell line, but by parthenogenesis. This finding coincided with that of the Seoul National University Investigation Committee last year.

By Wohn Dong-hee
Staff Writer for JoongAng Daily