Valérie Gouranton Biography

Valérie Gouranton has been a lecturer at the INSA in Rennes since 2006. She is co-author of about 70 international publications, has supervised 10 doctoral students and currently supervises 4. She was previously a lecturer at the University of Orléans between 1999 and 2006. She holds a doctorate from the University of Rennes, obtained in 1997.

Member of the Hybrid team, UMR IRISA / Inria-Rennes, her research activities are Virtual Reality, 3D Interaction, Collaborative Virtual Environments and issues related to the use of Virtual Reality for Archeology. Virtual Reality opens new perspectives in the field of cultural heritage and more specifically in archeology where scale-1 reconstructions in an immersive platform like Immersia (http://www.irisa.fr/immersia) offer tools and methods of innovative work for archaeologists. This field of application is accompanied by particular scientific problems: the representation of time. The archaeological sites studied have evolved over time. The dynamic and interactive representation of these evolutions allows archaeologists to better understand this evolution and the management of uncertainty. Site reconstructions are based on observations of vestiges and assumptions. Uncertainty must be taken into account both in the process of reconstitution and in the final restitution. Artefacts studied by archaeologists are often closer to nature than polished industrial objects derived from CAD typically encountered in virtual reality, which implies increased complexity on geometry. The solicitation of the proprioception and the motor capacities of a user in immersive virtual reality makes it possible to reproduce and better understand certain technical gestures carried out for example during the construction of certain monuments. Another form of interaction is the possibility of enriching the digital model with annotations that allow archaeologists to keep a visual trace of their reflections. Different processes of 3D reconstruction of sites and objects based on techniques of photogrammetry, laser scanner and medical imaging have been proposed. They both preserve high quality digital information for endangered sites and also access innovative virtual reality tools.

She set up this theme in 2012 in association with the UMR CReAAH (Center for Research in Archeology, Archeology and History) and we created the National Conservatory of the Archaeological Heritage of the West (https://cnpao.univ-rennes1.Fr) at the beginning of 2013. She is or has been involved in ANR, FUI, Labex Cominlabs projects with virtual reality training scenarios with interaction: CORVETTE and SIFORAS (industrial domain), S3PM and SUNSET (medical field) and PREVIZ cinema). She was also a member of the European VISIONAIR infrastructure project (FP7). She is the advisor to the French ANR Franco-Québec INTROSPECT project on the themes of archeology and Virtual Reality. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the French Association of Virtual Reality (AFRV), was elected to the Scientific Council of INSA Rennes, Laboratory Council of UMR IRISA and was co-supervising Master Research in Breton Computer Science. Website: http://people.irisa.fr/Valerie.Gouranton

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