Virtual museums enable Internet users to explore museum collections online. The question is how to enhance the viewer's experience and learning in such environments. In the Sarajevo Survival Tools virtual museum we introduced a new concept of interactive digital storytelling that will enable the visitors to explore the virtual exhibits -objects from the siege of Sarajevo -guided by a digital story. This way the virtual museum visitors will learn about the context of the displayed objects and be motivated to explore all of them. In this paper we present the virtual environment we developed and our experience with it. The results from three empirical studies we conducted, indicate the positive influence of digital storytelling and sound effects on visitors' perceptual response, resulting in increased motivation and enjoyment, and more effective information conveyance.
The cross-modal interaction between vision and other senses is a key part of how we perceive the real world. Significant stimulation to hearing, sense of smell, taste or touch can reduce the cognitive resources the brain is able to allocate to sight, and thus limit what the Human Visual System (HVS) can actually perceive at that moment. Selective rendering is able to exploit such knowledge of the HVS, to render those parts of a virtual environment a viewer is attending to at a high quality and the rest of the scene at a much lower quality, and thus at a substantially reduced rendering time, without the viewer being aware of this quality difference. This paper investigates how the presence of the modalities of sound, smell and ambient temperature in a virtual environment significantly affects a viewer's ability to perceive the quality of the graphics used for that environment. Experiments were run with a total of 356 participants to determine the graphics quality thresholds across the different cross-modal interactions. The results revealed a significant effect of strong perfume, high temperature and audio noise on perceived rendering quality. Under given conditions, this particular combination of modalities can be thus exploited when rendering virtual environments, to substantially reduce rendering time without any loss in the user's perception of delivered visual quality.
The goal of our work is to present the application of the modern technologies and computer graphics algorithms in the field of cultural heritage reconstruction and its protection. Here we describe a methodology for digital 3D acquisition of the "Stećak" (Stećak -plural Stećci -specific Bosnian Middle Ages tombstones),with purpose of its study and presentation. 3D laser scanning technology has been selected as the most accurate technology available for replicating a complete sampling of the very complex Stećak's surface. Afterwards, three algorithms for surface reconstruction were used to reconstruct its surface from point cloud data. This paper presents the results of that reconstruction and overview of various applications of reconstructed models.
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