Evaluating presence in cultural heritage projects

Virtual Platforms for Heritage Preservation in the Middle East: The Case of Medieval Cairo

“…Virtual heritage and cultural heritage, in such theoretical contexts, pose different and independent meanings; cultural heritage refers to sites, monuments, buildings and objects with historical, aesthetic, archaeological, scientific, ethnological or anthropological value, whereas virtual heritage refers to instances of these within a technological domain, usually involving computer visualisation of artefacts or virtual reality environments. Virtualisation is, however, much more complex and multi-layered than visualisation that is to form a mental image of something incapable of being viewed or visible at a certain moment (Pujol and Champion, 2013). It involves the verification of not only the specific moment, site or context, but also narratives, practices and habits (Madary & Metzinger, 2016).…”

“…(Champion, 2016). However, the idea of cultural content is rather limited and increasingly is under representative of several intangible aspects of cultural heritage; which were summarised by Pujol andChampion (2013) &Ch'ng (2013) as "practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills -as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith -that communities, groups and in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage".…”

Virtual Reality: Towards Preserving Alexandria Heritage by Raising the Awareness of the Locals

“…The best way to create an accurate experience is to consult literature to understand the historical culture of the place and then it can be designed in the virtual environment. It also can't be developed by a foreign expert: in the aforementioned surveys when the response team didn't include locals, it became difficult to achieve accurate Culture Presence (Pujol, 2012). In the next case study, the advantages and the challenges of virtual heritage projects will be illustrated through discussing the case study steps.…”

“3D·CoD”: A New Methodology for the Design of Virtual Reality-Mediated Experiences in Digital Archeology

“…The notion of Cultural Presence was based on James J. Gibson's ecological theory of perception (Gibson, 1950), and it defined a culturally meaningful interactive environment in which users could communicate and cooperate (Riva et al, 2002;Spagnolli et al, 2003). The concept was imported into the Cultural Heritage field by Erik Champion (2005), and was subsequently developed in several publications (Champion, 2007(Champion, , 2015Pujol and Champion, 2012). In the new domain, Cultural Presence was not the goal, but a means to serve the different, evolving purposes of Cultural Heritage.…”

“…Thanks to its state of conservation and the methodology set up to investigate it (Hodder, 2000), Çatalhöyük provided the optimal resolution to implement and test the concept of Cultural Presence. A general definition of the concept had been initially established, but since we started from the premise that the notion of culture is not universal (Pujol and Champion, 2012), we needed to characterize a specific instantiation of the concept and how to depict it by means of VR. This was the goal of the field work conducted at Çatalhöyük from July 25, 2015 to August 6, 2015, which was organized as a UCD exercise (aimed at defining the system requirements).…”