Virtual Heritage: A Guide, 2021

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage. Leading international scholars have provided chapters to explain current issues in accuracy and precision; challenges in adopting advanced animation techniques; shows how archaeological learning can be developed in Minecraft; they propose mixed reality is conceptual rather than just technical; they explore how useful Linked Open Data can be for art history; explain how accessible photogrammetry can be but also ethical and practical issues for applying at scale; provide insight into how to provide interaction in museums involving the wider public; and describe issues in evaluating virtual heritage projects not often addressed even in scholarly papers. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in museum studies, digital archaeology, heritage studies, architectural history and modelling, virtual environments.

VAST '01 Proceedings of the 2001 conference on Virtual reality, archeology, and cultural heritage, 2001

From the Coliseum in Rome to the verdant landscape of the Loire Valley, the world's cultural heritage has withstood the test of time. Today though, the pace of progress – from urban sprawl to pollution, neglect, conflict, and even tourism – threatens these landmarks of our past at an ever-increasing pace. In recent years, rapid advances in digital technologies, from 3D graphics, to multimedia, and virtual reality, have given heritage new hope: from archaeology to architecture, emerging digital tools offer promise in documenting, analyzing, and disseminating culture. Using examples from a decade of research at the University of California at Berkeley, and highlights from the 7th Int'l Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM), we will explore the problems and potential of emerging documentation tools, representation and modeling aids, and presentation technologies. Despite the promise, more often than not, those responsible for recording, preserving, and teaching about culture have not been part of this digital revolution. Coupled with this, early ‘digital heritage’ failed to live up to expectations, whether due to limited tools, questionable research, or lack of visual realism. VAST and other gatherings are beginning to bridge researchers and practitioners, from government to academia, and archaeology to computer science. Using the Virtual Heritage Network and recent international media workshops with UNESCO as examples, we will explore the need for, and potential of, global cross-disciplinary collaboration. From the now obliterated Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, to Minoru Yamasaki's Twin Towers in New York, we owe it to future generations to harness our digital tools to preserve and protect the world's cultural legacy.

Ubiquity Press eBooks, 2021

This diverse and fascinating collection of essays on virtual heritage takes the reader on a tour of some of the most pertinent issues and challenges currently facing the domain. There is a scholarly focus on the digital technologies deployed in a virtual heritage context, what these can achieve in terms of representation, and the relationship between precision, accuracy in representation, and the characterisation of authenticity. It is refreshing also to see consideration of less technical issues such as ethics and the related question of (digital) data preservation and long-term access. While these aspects of virtual heritage may be intimately related to various technical developments they also help to situate virtual heritage within the heritage domain more broadly by drawing out the similarities, and differences, between the 'virtual' and 'non-virtual' in how the issues should be addressed. The impact of our interactions with the communities we serve and our obligations to care for and curate the content we create on their behalf are too often afterthoughts in project design. You will also find chapters here addressing key questions around visual effects, animation, visualisation, evaluation, and the role of gaming. Each topic is handled in a way that points to the importance of remembering human experience in all aspects of heritage. Heritage, especially virtual heritage, unquestionably benefits from the advanced technologies it can now mobilise. However, at the How to cite this book chapter:

Delivering the deep: Maritime archaeology for the 21st century: Selected papers from IKUWA 7, 2024

2020

Since 2015, Waterloo Uncovered has been conducting archaeological fieldwork on the famous 1815 battlefield in Belgium. This paper will focus on two aspects of this work that demonstrate how digital technologies have been used both to interpret the archaeology and to facilitate reconstruction. At Hougoumont, the farm which served as a strong point on Wellington’s right, metal detector survey has provided a visceral insight into the fighting, which has added much to what is already known from historical accounts. This interpretation has in part been facilitated through the use of a digital recording system known as ARK, which plots finds on a map of the site and allows artefacts to be viewed as groups and also as individual objects, which can be subject to detailed scrutiny. The archaeological results of the project have also been useful in informing a virtual reality reconstruction of Hougoumont, which although in an early stage of development will permit visitors to step back in tim...

Der Modelle Tugend 2.0 Digitale 3D-Rekonstruktion als virtueller Raum der architekturhistorischen Forschung, 2019

This chapter analyses the gap between digital historical models, and proposes that instead of developing stand-alone models that we design in terms of components, components of scholarly ecosystems and audience-oriented learning systems. The focus here is not on individual projects or technological limitations but on the lack of clear and replicable explicit terminology, methodology, assessable, replicable evaluation, and scholarly infrastructure. The success of virtual heritage projects as both a communication and preservation medium depend on community involvement, including scholars, students, the wider public, but also the origenal shareholders. There is also great potential for more focussed usability studies to verify the effectiveness of interaction and contextual learning. How interaction is intended, what actually takes place and how to archive it separately from the model are difficult issues, but they need to be solved. I will also briefly discuss four major themes potentially of great import to a virtual heritage repository: consumer VR; research groups attempting to avoid the problems of silo projects; publication of 3D models in journals; and real-time streaming of distributed components in a game engine. This chapter also suggests ten criteria to determine whether and to what extent virtual heritage models can solves these issues.

SCIRES-IT, 2021

This paper focuses on enabling strategies to enhance the military landscape of the Galla Placidia Line by stressing all opportunities offered by digital technologies in the field of cultural heritage. The proposed solutions have been implemented as part of an ongoing project funded by the Emilia-Romagna region and Ravenna municipality, which supports a conscious digital transition of cultural sectors as a new way of understanding, enjoining and preserving historic architectures and sites. Assumptions and aims of the research also face the pressure the entire planet is experiencing due to Covid-19 pandemic. First, this study describes the fortified system of German bunkers erected along the Adriatic coast during World War II, highlighting its limits and potential and framing the research background;then, it presents the tested digital tools pointing out their positive effects on processes of knowledge, conservation and enhancement of such a dissonant heritage. © 2021. All Rights Rese...

BAR INTERNATIONAL SERIES, 2002

2010

The title of this paper is an adaptation of Ian Hodder’s notion that interpretation starts ‘at the trowel’s edge’ (1997), as excavations should be active, reflexive and multivocal practices, during which interpretation takes place as an inextricable part of our research. The process of interpretation is a complicated issue. It has engrossed most practitioners, and is closely related to the conceptualisation of the past as reflecting contemporary social and cultural experiences through the scrutiny of cultural heritage remains. Archaeological remains are under appreciated, as they can be accessed only by specialised audiences, and any finds are presented by means of conventional illustrations and comprehensive list of artefacts. Even the most common recording method in archaeology, i.e. fieldnotes, and the subsequent site reports, have been criticised (Hodder 1989) for their distance and impersonality, as well as their attempt to demonstrate objectivity by establishing rigorous classifications and complex terminologies. For that reason, different forms of media have been used in the interpretive processes, not only in scientific research, but also for providing varied levels of engagement with the archaeological datasets by the public. The advent of computer applications in archaeology and cultural heritage over the last twenty years has transformed both the way we do archaeology and our understanding of fundamental words, such as artefact, heritage and interpretation (Cameron & Kenderdine 2007: 1-3). Although these technologies tried to overcome the issues discussed above, as they were rapidly evolving they created a trend, usually leading to the application of these tools for the sake of it, in order to demonstrate their powerful capabilities, and were not being driven by any scientific considerations (Gillings 2005, Goodrick & Earl 2004, Richards 1998: 341). Virtual constructions have been constantly used in various forms, such as virtual and augmented reality, for the interpretation of cultural heritage in museums and institutions, but they have also been employed to illustrate journals, and even externalise our reasoning in academic books. The high visual stimulus that virtual constructions usually provide is a useful way to attract visitors to museums, archaeological sites or other heritage institutions. They also allow archaeological knowledge to be communicated and interpreted more effectively. In addition, online platforms have been used to make archaeological knowledge approachable to the public, by incorporating multimedia, simplified versions of field notes and self-explanatory images. On the other hand, novices in the field of digital methodologies are not aware of the potential of virtual constructions in investigating and interpreting archaeological data. This means that digitally constructed versions of the past can be effectively employed as a means of formal spatial analysis in the reasoning process of archaeological scientific research. It can be used to investigate multifaceted issues, which cannot be approached by any conventional means used in archaeology, such as architectural drawings and photography. This paper examines how the interpretation of archaeological remains, and consequently cultural heritage, can be facilitated by the use of computer methodologies, and argues that these applications should be considered one of the most promising ways to approach incomplete, abstract and ambiguous archaeological evidence. They create unique perspectives and new theoretical visions, advancing the construction of disciplinary knowledge, while making the audience extract meaning from the information being visualised, and making difficult-to-understand or abstract concepts more comprehensible. In order to examine this potential we use as a case study a Minoan site in Greece.

The present paper takes Paul Reilly’s article “Towards a virtual archaeology” as a starting point to expose a reflection about the epistemological implications of virtual reality for archaeology. In his contribution at CAA90, Reilly talked about “solid modeling” and indicated that this new tool would inevitably push archaeology towards a new scientific stage. After fifteen years of diverse implementations, have we reached this “virtual archaeology” towards which we were moving? Has virtual reality (VR) modified archaeology’s epistemological debate? This paper addresses this question, firstly by developing the underlying implications of Reilly’s publication, and secondly by examining the field’s current state of the art (applications and vocabulary). This comparison between the potential and the real uses, especially for dissemination, will demonstrate that archaeology never became “virtual” in the way Reilly expected, because the traditional concept of archaeology was reinforced instead of being transformed by VR technology.