Virtual Heritage: Researching and Visualizing the Past in 3D

Abstract

The approaches and technologies of virtual heritage provide archaeologists, researchers, and students with the ability to “see” and understand the past interactively and in 3D, just as the past happened. The results of various projects underscore the new insights into the past that inevitably result from virtual reality re-creations of ancient sites, buildings, and artifacts. Interactive 3D virtual worlds offer many advantages over traditional 2D-based media. By collecting, integrating, and visualizing field data digitally, in 3D, and in a single software toolkit, excavations can participate in the coming paradigm shift in archaeology. This change in how the discipline works is exemplified by REVEAL, a new software system that is already having an impact on dozens of excavations around the world.

Building a virtual Roman city: teaching history through video game design

“…(2008), Christensen and Machado (2010) and Rogers (2011) provide additional case studies that exemplify the use of video games as a teaching tool in the classroom. Even in the fields of the liberal arts, scholars have been long discussing the benefits of VR and AR technologies for research and teaching, both of which share a symbiotic relationship with video game design software (Cargill, 2009; Hanson and Shelton, 2008; Roth and Fisher, 2019; Sanders, 2014; Schrader and Bastiaens, 2012; Slater, 2009). Hopefully this article has inspired others to use game design technologies as a tool for teaching or, at the very least, persuaded those who are sceptical to read further and consider the massive potential of this emerging digital humanities application.…”

Reconstructing Past Experience Using Virtual Reality

“…Both make use of virtual objects, but augmented reality adds overlays these virtual objects on a real physical environment. Virtual environments and objects can be engaged with through web browser plugins such as Cortona3D, game engines like Unity3D, or even viewed in stereo 3D in a CAVE (Sanders, 2014). Cave Automated Virtual Environments (CAVE) are immersive VR systems that utilize a number of screens to produce a stereo images (Knabb et al, 2014).…”

Chronology and Geospace Design in Virtual Reality for Archaeological Data Exhibition

“…Virtual reality is not new to archaeology. Because of the concrete problem of the remoteness of the archaeological sites and the limited use of the findings, the work of archaeologists has always been focused on the collection of photographs and the creation of maps and detailed drawings to restore the archaeological experience even at a distance [13]. Virtual reality makes possible the digital acquisition of an artifact or structure, allowing the recreation of faithful copies that reconstruct the experience of being in their presence.…”

“…The virtual reality environment, relying on the possibilities of augmenting the surveyed sites and findings with computer generated imagery (CGI), allows the visualization of abstractions and the realization of movements that would be impossible in a physical exhibition. These features are especially useful in the case of ongoing archaeo-logical projects, where an updatable virtual environment can be connected in real-time to the database of the recorded information [13] to inform the communities and keep alive the digital materials, which are often endangered or inaccessible [14]. The virtual environment must merge the conventions for the exhibition of the archaeological site (reconstruction of known parts, hypotheses to be reported and artist inventions to be marked) with the conventions of the museums for the exhibition of artifacts, with information extracted from the database and exhibited together with items from related sites.…”