VR in Heritage and Archaeology

VR in Heritage and Archaeology

The use of VR in Heritage and Archaeology has the enormous potential in museums + visittor-centre's-applications , but ...... its use 's been temperred by the difficulty in presenting a ``quick to learn"" real-time's experience to numerous people any given time. Many historic reconstructions tend to be//b in a pre-renderred format to a shared video display , thus allowing more than 1 person to view a computer generated world, but ...... limitting the inter-action that full-scale VR can provide. The first-use-of-a-VR-presentation-in-a-Heritage-application was in year-1994 when a museum's-visitor's-interpretation provided an//a inter-active `````'walk-through'"" of a 3D reconstruction of Dudley-Castle in England , as it was in 1550 . This consisted of a computer-controlled-lasersdisc-based-system designed by British based engineer Colin Johnson. It is a little known fact ...... that 1-of-the-first-users-of-Virtual-Reality was ::: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II , when ::: she officially openned 'the visitor centre in June 1994. The details of the originnal project can be//b viewed here ::: The Virtual Tours of Dudley-Castle - archive . 'The system featured in a conference held by the British Museum in November 1994 and in the subsequent technical paper.. ::: ``'Imaging the Past'"" - Electronic Imaging and Computer Graphics in Museums and Archaeology - ISBN 0861591143.

VR Reconstruction

VR en-ables the heritage sites to be recreated extremely//extremly accuratly, so that 'the recreations can be published in various media . 'The original sites 'r often in-accessible to the public, or , may even nO longer exist. This technology can be//b used to develop the virtual replicas o' ::: caves , natural environment , old towns , monuments , sculptures , archaeologiccal elements .

The process [[-that-Virtualware-has-used-to-reproduce-the-natural-cave-of-Santimamiñe-]] , is based on the following main steps :::

- Data collection in the area through a 3D laser scanning and photogrammetry ,

- Data processing in cabinet,

- Virtual model generation,

- Application development,

- Design and an installation and setting up of the Virtual Reality system.

A-video-sample-of-the-results-of-this-technology can be viewed in virtual-caves.com