Digital Reconstruction of Elmina Castle for Mobile Virtual Reality via Point-based Detail Transfer

Abstract

Reconstructing 3D models from large, dense point clouds is critical to enable Virtual Reality (VR) as a platform for entertainment, education, and heritage preservation. Existing 3D reconstruction systems inevitably make trade-offs between three conflicting goals: the efficiency of reconstruction (e.g., time and memory requirements), the visual quality of the constructed scene, and the rendering speed on the VR device. This paper proposes a reconstruction system that simultaneously meets all three goals. The key idea is to avoid the resource-demanding process of reconstructing a high-polygon mesh altogether. Instead, we propose to directly transfer details from the original point cloud to a low polygon mesh, which significantly reduces the reconstruction time and cost, preserves the scene details, and enables real-time rendering on mobile VR devices.While our technique is general, we demonstrate it in reconstructing cultural heritage sites. We for the first time digitally reconstruct the Elmina Castle, a UNESCO world heritage site at Ghana, from billions of laser-scanned points. The reconstruction process executes on low-end desktop systems without requiring high processing power, making it accessible to the broad community. The reconstructed scenes render on Oculus Go in 60 FPS, providing a real-time VR experience with high visual quality. Our project is part of the Digital Elmina effort (http://digitalelmina.org/) between

Seamless Crime Scene Reconstruction in Mixed Reality for Investigation Training: A Design and Evaluation Study

“…Moreover, a series of consultations with experts in 3D scanning in the cultural heritage field were conducted, and then a number of techniques of 3D point cloud laser scanners were shortlisted to achieve the high level of detail required. Eventually, FARO point cloud 3D scanner X130 was chosen to perform the capturing due to its efficiency in reconstructing exterior and interior scenes and its ability to generate coloured textures in previous studies [46,47]. 3D scanning process -Finding an actual crime scene to use as a case study is quite complicated due to the restrictions regarding police permissions, privacy constraints and the timing for conducting it after the incident.…”