Virtual Heritage (Incarnation of the Truth)

Have you ever wondered what the Colossus of Rhodes really looked like, or wished you could have strolled through the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Did you miss your chance to visit the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan or the World Trade Center in New York, both of which are now destroyed? In the future, you may not have to worry about missing out on these wonderful sights. There are a number of groups utilizing virtual reality to insure that soon everyone will have a chance to visit the wonders of our world, both past and present.

Cultural heritage is becoming an important application for virtual reality technology working under the label of Virtual Heritage, the idea behind these projects is to conserve, preserve and interpret world's cultural and natural history. Virtual reality technology is also solving one of the largest issues concerning present-day cultural heritage assets.

Re-creations of culture heritage structures are done for many reasons. For instance, The Museum of the Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses in China is using a laser range finder to document the fragile terra cotta statues before they are unearthed. Since the very act of digging these artworks out of the ground causes damage no matter how carefully it is done this method allows scientist to discover important aspects of the relics such as the original color of the statues which has now leeched into the surrounding clay. Many of these relics were also broken in ancient times and the virtual models allow scientists to 'pick up and move' the virtual pieces allowing reconstruction without any additional damage to the still buried statues. This also allows most of the relics to be left where they are for future generations of scientists who may have better tools.

Techniques used in Virtual Heritage Applications

Virtual heritage applications use the immersive and interactive qualities of VR to give students or museum visitors access to computer reconstructions of historical sites that would normally be inaccessible, due to location or fragile condition. They also provide the possibility of visiting places that no longer exist at all, or of viewing the how the places would have appeared at different times in history. A number of research projects have delved into the problems of building accurate digital reconstructions of ancient artifacts. For example, Boulanger et al describe the work done in creating models of the tombs of Nefertari and Tutankhamun, and presenting a VR tour of the models in a public museum

Tele-immersion is a technique used with VR to obtain more intelligent solutions.

Tele-immersion is defined as the synthesis of collaborative virtual environments, audio and video conferencing, and supercomputing resources and massive data stores, all interconnected and running over high-speed national or worldwide networks . Tele-immersion enables people at distant locations to work together in a common virtual space, particularly on problems in highly compute-intensive areas such as scientific visualization, computational steering, and design engineering. With tele-immersion technologies, it will be possible to take the cultural heritage work that has been done so far, and expand it beyond a single location to create a virtual museum or educational environment, which can be visited at any time by users on the Internet.