Cultural Tourism
Applications

Since antiquity, images were used as records of both events-lifestyles, as well as decorations. The possibility of reviving them will add a new dimension in understanding our past. Potentially a Virtual Reality-based heritage experience gives the visitor die opportunity to feel they are present at significant places and times in the past and use a variety of senses to experience what it would have felt like to be there.

Virtual heritage makes the interpretations of history more accessible to the general public, and at the same time narrow the individual’s scope for personalized, interactive experience and visualization of the description of it.

Creating digital 3D models, which enable the recreation of the contexts, require cross disciplinary collaboration to provide accuracy through a balanced incorporation of historical and archaeological information.  

AVRA is concerned with virtual reconstruction and visualization of ancient cities, digital reconstruction, cultural heritage documentation and digital preservation. VR representation can put historical heritage into the context of the modern landscape, in order to help visitors link history with their own present day life. VR technology allows comparing current environment with the past which can enhance both experience and understanding.  Most virtual cultural heritage applications are interactive. Practice has shown that users prefer to interact with digital content over being just passive observers/viewers of a movie or pre-rendered installation. We have been exploring whether digital storytelling could also be implemented as interactive, and up to what amount of interactivity, without the user losing the context and thread of the story. Computer animation is a very appropriate technique for presenting and representing ancient tangible life such as city planning, urban structures, and also intangible cultural heritage, such as crafts, music, social life etc. Interactive storytelling can also be implemented through the spatial movement of the user in the virtual environment, so that his/her position towards certain points of interest triggers corresponding parts of the story.