Cultural Heritage

Due to lack of information, the significance of many important sites of cultural interest is often misunderstood by visitors. Learning about the function and relevance of archaeological sites typically involves consultation of specific literature or on-site explanations by tourist guides. A very attractive way to discover and better understand these cultural sites would be to see and visit them at their glory time. For this, travel in time and space would be best, and Virtual Reality is offering it through cultural heritage applications.

In cultural heritage applications, Virtual Reality techniques are used to visually re-create historical elements that have today disappeared in archaeological sites.

This chapter reviews some applications of Virtual Reality and augmented reality in the cultural heritage field. We discuss their benefits to the visitors and/or viewers and the associated technical challenges. We start with archaeological data acquisition and reconstruction. Then, we present projects that allow visiting ancient places with different degrees of realism and interaction. We start with virtual tours of buildings followed by more complex applications, where you could actually meet their inhabitants.

A virtual tour is one of the most traditional applications of VR in the field of cultural heritage. These virtual tours allow the user to walk through, see, and interact with 3D models of old cities or buildings that have historical value. In this Section, we present several tours that are representative of different cultures and technologies.