Comparing Innovative Xr Systems in Cultural Heritage. A Case Study

Abstract

The technological advances made in the recent years in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have led to a revolution in many adjacent areas. One of these is Cultural Heritage (CH), as the new array of XR technologies (a concept integrating Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality) is offering new interaction possibilities. The purpose of this paper is to compare several such technologies at application level, and to classify them based on common features such as Interaction, Manipulability, Ease of Use and others. The study presented in this paper was carried out during the H2020 project eHERITAGE ('Expanding the Research and Innovation Capacity in Cultural Heritage Virtual Reality Applications'). The action had as output multiple XR systems/applications. We compare 4 of them: a smartphone-based AR application, a digital book with 3D elements deployed on a large touchscreen, a large holographic display and a bow simulator built using a VR headset and a mechatronic system. We evaluate these innovative systems in the context of the 2 educational events, when over 4000 participants interacted with our team. Results show that systems with greater interaction and immersion features were preferred over the others. Furthermore, Mixed Reality was preferred over Virtual and Augmented Reality.

Designing an Extended Reality Mobile Guide Application to Communicate and Interpret Serial World Heritage Sites: A Case Study of Korea’s Seowon Unesco World Heritage Site

“…The cultural heritage sector is no exception. A promising aspect of XR applications for outdoor heritage interpretation is that they bridge real and virtual heritage environments (Carrozzino et al, 2019). Moreover, XR applications allow cultural institutions to take advantage of the devices that visitors already own, such as smartphones, instead of investing in dedicated hardware infrastructure.…”

eXtended Reality for Cultural Heritage

“…There are many technological possibilities to implement an XR application offering different experiences and interactions for the user [60][61][62]. In this section, we will present the main different systems and interactions that can be proposed, and we will develop two notions of interaction that can be used in a Cultural Heritage context.…”

3d Surveying, Semantic Enrichment and Virtual Access of Large Cultural Heritage

“…This blend combines capabilities from the worlds of VR (in which the user is fully immersed in the computer graphic world) and standard AR, resulting in an environment where digital and physical coexists and interact (Teruggi and Fassi, 2021). MR and AR have been used in a variety of fields: assembly and disassembly (De Pace et al, 2018), human-robot interaction (Avalle et al, 2019), navigation (Fraga-Lamas et al, 2018), medicine (Desselle et al, 2020;Brun et al, 2019), Architecture Engineering Construction and Operations -AECO (Bae et al, 2015;Golparvard-Fard and Ham, 2014;Alam et al, 2017) as well as cultural heritage (De Carolis et al, 2018;Carrozzino et al, 2019).…”