Traditional approaches to virtual archaeology include dealing with research methods to capture information from heritage sites, creating models out of that information and how to present them to the public; these are intense technical procedures which might be too costly for some types of history or heritage-based projects. Virtual worlds allowed new types of models of/for heritage sites to be produced and disseminated at a fraction of the cost.Second Life®, and its open source counterpart, OpenSimulator, are virtual world platforms with user-generated content. 3D models are created in real time and instantly rendered for all visitors. This allows amateurs and researchers create their own virtual archaeology projects easily and with few costs, and to have the resulting models immediately available to a vast community of users. This article presents an overview of four different approaches to virtual archaeology projects that are present in these platforms and that have been publicly discussed and analyzed; in particular, the last type shows a novel approach to virtual archaeology which is not found in other platforms, and explains how researchers have managed to extend the concept to new areas and develop methodologies to incorporate the validation of historical accuracy to encompass these areas.
Virtual worlds have been successfully employed as tools for educational, simulation and training use. The ability for users to easily create their own content with simple editing tools has made the Second Life Grid® platform, and its free open source equivalent, OpenSimulator, very popular. While the Second Life Grid offers more features, stability and a larger user base, cost considerations and some lack of control have led some projects to consider development/deployment exclusively on an OpenSimulator grid. This poses the problem of how to transfer to such a grid any content that was developed and refined in the Second Life Grid, since the company behind Second Life ®, Linden Lab, does not offer an archival/restore facility for user-generated content. In this article, we analyse some third-party tools that can partially backup and restore some content and describe a mechanism to automatically capture all content in a whole region of the Second Life Grid and save it to a commonly used file format (Open Archive) that is universally used on OpenSimulator grids, and report on a prototype we developed to implement it with reasonable results, but also some serious limitations, which are further discussed.
For the past two decades, historians and archaeologists have reconstructed heritage sites using computer-generated graphics in three dimensions, a technique known as “virtual archaeology.” Early research focused merely on displaying models of the architecture or of archaeological artifacts, but with the emergence of virtual worlds, researchers and the public can “immerse” themselves in the reconstructed environment and experience the equivalent of a guided tour. User-generated content has allowed historians to now go a step further and modify the models, by formulating hypotheses and testing them interactively, creating a “virtual laboratory of archaeology.” In this chapter, a solution is offered whereby historians are able to manipulate the parameters of a crowd simulation without the need of learning conventional computer programming. This conceptual framework is loosely based on strategy computer games, which also allow players to simulate relatively complex crowds by visually placing markers on the ground. It extends the concept of the virtual laboratory of archaeology beyond the architectural representation of heritage sites by placing the tools of crowd simulation in the hands of historians.
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