Interactive Immersive Virtualmuseum: Digital Documentation for Virtual Interaction

Abstract

Thanks to their playful and educational approach Virtual Museum systems are very effective for the communication of Cultural Heritage. Among the latest technologies Immersive Virtual Reality is probably the most appealing and potentially effective to serve this purpose; nevertheless, due to a poor user-system interaction, caused by an incomplete maturity of a specific technology for museum applications, it is still quite uncommon to find immersive installations in museums.<br> This paper explore the possibilities offered by this technology and presents a workflow that, starting from digital documentation, makes possible an interaction with archaeological finds or any other cultural heritage inside different kinds of immersive virtual reality spaces.<br> Two different cases studies are presented: the National Archaeological Museum of Marche in Ancona and the 3D reconstruction of the Roman Forum of Fanum Fortunae. Two different approaches not only conceptually but also in contents; while the Archaeological Museum is represented in the application simply using spherical panoramas to give the perception of the third dimension, the Roman Forum is a 3D model that allows visitors to move in the virtual space as in the real one.<br> In both cases, the acquisition phase of the artefacts is central; artefacts are digitized with the photogrammetric technique Structure for Motion then they are integrated inside the immersive virtual space using a PC with a HTC Vive system that allows the user to interact with the 3D models turning the manipulation of objects into a fun and exciting experience.<br> The challenge, taking advantage of the latest opportunities made available by photogrammetry and ICT, is to enrich visitors’ experience in Real Museum making possible the interaction with perishable, damaged or lost objects and the public access to inaccessible or no longer existing places promoting in this way the preservation of fragile sites.

Virtual Reality Models Based on Photogrammetric Surveys—A Case Study of the Iconostasis of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral Church of Saint Nicholas in Sremski Karlovci (Serbia)

“…Therefore, mesh optimization is closely related to texture optimization. The most commonly used approach to reduce the polygon count without losing the visual quality of the 3D reconstructed model generally follows the three-step pipeline [19,21,33,34]:…”

“…When it comes to creating a VR experience, several different game engines can be employed. The two most popular, however, are Unity [20,22,23,28,33] and Unreal Engine [19,21,24,26,34]. Authors that selected the Unreal Engine [21,24,26,34], pointed out its intuitive use mode, based on the Blueprint Visual Scripting system, as the major characteristic.…”

“…When developing an interactive reality-based VR application, special attention needs to be given to the particular way of engaging user with the digital environment, in terms of enabling him/her to experience it in the way which is otherwise not possible inside the real environment. One of the common methods to achieve this is by using VR teleportation mode [21,33]. In the next section, a created method for developing a VR environment from the photogrammetrically surveyed cultural heritage object is presented.…”

“…In addition, MeshLab [19,36], can be also used for both the decimation and the retopology, as it presents an open-source 3D mesh processing software that provides a set of tools for editing, cleaning, inspecting, rendering, and converting unstructured large meshes. In some cases, the CAD software 3ds Max [33] can be used for mesh decimation, but dealing with the high-poly 3D models such as photogrammetric SfM models, automatic decimation in 3ds Max very often crashes or causes geometric errors like self-intersections, holes, and flipped normals [33].…”

360° Images for Uav Multisensor Data Fusion: First Tests and Results

“…In the recent years the market sector related with spherical images and videos was subjected to a rapid growth; spherical images are commonly known as panoramas (Luhmann, 2004) and apart from their use for documentation, visualization and sharing purposes (Clini et al, 2018;Kwiatek, 2012), like 360° videos, AR/VR applications, etc., these products may offer some interesting advantages from the photogrammetric point of view, not fully explored yet. The first researches on the approaches connected with the photogrammetric use of these kinds of images can be traced back in 2007 (Fangi, 2007), and were connected with the generation of spherical images through the stitching of different images acquired around a nodal point from the same camera, following the Computer Vision approach developed by Szeliski and Shum at the end of the '90 (Szeliski & Shum, 1997).…”