In recent years, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Virtuality (AV), and Mixed Reality (MxR) have become popular immersive reality technologies for cultural knowledge dissemination in Virtual Heritage (VH). These technologies have been utilized for enriching museums with a personalized visiting experience and digital content tailored to the historical and cultural context of the museums and heritage sites. Various interaction methods, such as sensor-based, device-based, tangible, collaborative, multimodal, and hybrid interaction methods, have also been employed by these immersive reality technologies to enable interaction with the virtual environments. However, the utilization of these technologies and interaction methods isn't often supported by a guideline that can assist Cultural Heritage Professionals (CHP) to predetermine their relevance to attain the intended objectives of the VH applications. In this regard, our paper attempts to compare the existing immersive reality technologies and interaction methods against their potential to enhance cultural learning in VH applications. To objectify the comparison, three factors have been borrowed from existing scholarly arguments in the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain. These factors are the technology's or the interaction method's potential and/or demonstrated capability to: (1) establish a contextual relationship between users, virtual content, and cultural context, (2) allow collaboration between users, and (3) enable engagement with the cultural context in the virtual environments and the virtual environment itself. Following the comparison, we have also proposed a specific integration of collaborative and multimodal interaction methods into a Mixed Reality (MxR) scenario that can be applied to VH applications that aim at enhancing cultural learning in situ .

The 3D reconstruction of real-world heritage objects using either a laser scanner or 3D modelling software is typically expensive and requires a high level of expertise. Image-based 3D modelling software, on the other hand, offers a cheaper alternative, which can handle this task with relative ease. There also exists free and open source (FOSS) software, with the potential to deliver quality data for heritage documentation purposes. However, contemporary academic discourse seldom presents survey-based feature lists or a critical inspection of potential production pipelines, nor typically provides direction and guidance for non-experts who are interested in learning, developing and sharing 3D content on a restricted budget. To address the above issues, a set of FOSS were studied based on their offered features, workflow, 3D processing time and accuracy. Two datasets have been used to compare and evaluate the FOSS applications based on the point clouds they produced. The average deviation to ground truth data produced by a commercial software application (Metashape, formerly called PhotoScan) was used and measured with CloudCompare software. 3D reconstructions generated from FOSS produce promising results, with significant accuracy, and are easy to use. We believe this investigation will help non-expert users to understand the photogrammetry and select the most suitable software for producing image-based 3D models at low cost for visualisation and presentation purposes.

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