Built Heritage Visualizations in Immersive Environments to Support Significance Assessments by Multiple Stakeholders

Abstract

Abstract. In recent years, technological advances in game engines allowed researchers to propose methodological frameworks for integrating digital models of the built heritage in Virtual (VR), Augmented (AR) and Mixed Reality environments. Among other benefits, specific applications have demonstrated the potential of such immersive environments to raise awareness about the significance of historical objects, share associated knowledge and facilitate its collaborative management. Based on the necessity to retrieve information about users' experience, this research considers the potential of such environments to include a broader range of stakeholders in the value assessment process for historical sites and objects and provide more comprehensive representations of their significance for society. This paper proposes implementing a collaborative framework for value assessment in a virtual environment that combines multiple heritage representations to explore this issue. A prototype is further implemented on a practical case study, namely the Collegiate Church of Saint-Jean, located in Liège, Belgium.

The Application of Historic Building Information Modelling (HBIM) to Cultural Heritage: A Review

“…Refs. [55,175] suggest data in a BIM model could be shared via VR to reduce intervention errors on construction sites and aid future maintenance works. Ref.…”

“…Another stream of research has suggested the use of VR to enable the population of the geometric model with additional data remotely, a development partially instigated by the COVID-19 pandemic [70,175]. This technique has been successful, with [177] demonstrating that a VR tour allowed students on their 'survey education' course to make meaningful observations on the condition of a temple in China.…”

“…The benefit of VR/AR for populating these data is that all stakeholders can input their significance assessments, a key factor of effective CH management [7]. This utilisation of VR was successfully employed by [175], who created a model of a church in Belgium and allowed VR visitors to place colour-coded markers about what they deemed significant and the type of significance. The system recorded geospatial data relating to where visitors were standing in the virtual environment when they placed the markers.…”

“…The system recorded geospatial data relating to where visitors were standing in the virtual environment when they placed the markers. The authors of [175] suggest using the geospatial data to plan future visitor routes, a sentiment echoed by [20], and go on to suggest the information regarding who attributed value to what could be used more generally to improve the process for historical significance assessments.…”

Virtual reconstruction from scan to VR of architecture and landscape of a monumental park

“…In the last years, thanks to the development of more and more powerful hardware technologies and software, able to exploit both the computational skills and the image processing, the dissemination through digital tools in the Heritage field have been developing in an increasingly extensive way [Joannides 2017]. In the field of digital culture related to heritage, the strands are intertwined concerting experiences that can bring to common factor historical, architectural and cultural issues declined through new experiences of storytelling mediated by the experiences of Virtual, Augmented or Mixed Reality [Russo 2021;Teruggi, Fassi 2021;Jouan et al 2022]. The experience of digital fruition, or better, totally viral if not entirely immersive, has become part of museums and institutions, places that open their contents to an increasing number of scholarly enthusiasts or simple users with a thirst for learning [Aiello 2019;Spallone et al 2022].…”