Animating Past Worlds

Creating ‘past worlds’ is more than just creative flair or technical wizardry, it is the distillation of grounded heritage interpretation and reflection as applied to the creative (re)visualization of ancient peoples and landscapes. Be it the digital dinosaurs of Jurassic Park or the fake placement of lifelike digital actors seamlessly inserted within media, virtual heritage is increasingly caught between the praxis of the visual enchantment of feature film and television visual effects (VFX), the increasing visual and phenomenological immersive worlds of 3D, virtual games and the hyper-reality of deep fake VFX. This chapter will provide the basics of animation, while at the same time introducing the reader to the concepts of virtual archaeology and digital cultural heritage from a digital visualization perspective.

Mixed Reality: A Bridge or a Fusion Between Two Worlds?

Virtual heritage (VH) is one of the few domains to adopt immersive reality technologies at early stages, with a significant number of studies employing the technologies for various application themes. More specifically, virtual reality has persisted as a de facto immersive reality technology for virtual reconstruction and virtual museums. In recent years, however, mixed reality (MxR) has attracted attention from the VH community following the introduction of new devices, such as Microsoft HoloLens, to the technological landscape of immersive reality. Two variant perceptions of MxR have been observed in the literature over the past two decades. First, MxR is perceived as an umbrella/collective term for a virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) environment. Second, it is also presented as a distinctive form of immersive reality that enables merging virtual elements with their real-world counterparts. These perceptions influence our choice of immersive reality technology, interaction design, and implementation, and the overall objective of VH applications. To address these concerns, this chapter attempts to answer two critical questions: (1) what MxR from VH perspective is and (2) whether MxR is just a form of immersive reality that serves as a bridge to connect the real world with a virtual one or a fusion of both that neither the real nor the virtual world would have meaning without a contextual relationship and interaction with each other. To this end, this chapter will review VH applications and literature from the past few years and identify how MxR is presented. It will also suggest how the VH community can benefit from MxR and discuss limitations in existing technology and identify some areas and direction for future research in the domain.

Video Games as Concepts and Experiences of the Past

More and more, people do not experience the past through books, museums, or even television, but through video games. This chapter discusses how these popular entertainment products provide playful and fun experiences of the past.

Hybrid Interactions in Museums: Why Materiality Still Matters

The importance of physical and tangible qualities in museum visits has been established by extensive literature exploring the importance of materiality (Dudley, 2013) and multisensory experiences (Levent and Pascual-Leone, 2014) of heritage. A challenge for digital technology design is to ensure that these dimensions are not lost to visually heavy virtual experiences. This chapter examines hybrid interactions in museums, outlining exemplars of successful physical- digital installations and defining the key aspects to consider for their design and evaluation. The goal is to complement chapters on virtual approaches to heritage with insights on how and why to successfully bridge physical and digital in hybrid designs.

Preserving Authenticity in Virtual Heritage

This chapter examines why we wish to preserve heritage objects and practices via virtual heritage, and why the issue of authenticity is so important here but so seldom addressed. If we could give criteria to select and to create useful and even authentic-oriented virtual heritage projects, what would they be? Or are there methods and solutions out there waiting to be discovered?

Photogrammetry: What, How, and Where

Developing 3D digital models of artefacts, monuments, excavations and historic landscapes as part of digital documentation is becoming common in the field of heritage management, virtual tourism, immersive Due to the present pandemic situation with restricted social distancing; gallery, library, archive, and museum (GLAM) industries are facing an incremental burden on both their income and visitor traffic, which is affecting their survival. As a way out, we can see some GLAM institutes are trying to expand their collections on digital platforms for showcasing and promoting virtual visits. Numerous online portals and repositories are evolving for archiving, sharing, and trading 3D models are also evolving to support this digital vibe. This chapter explains the basics of photogrammetry and its development workflow, including data acquisition (photo shooting), data processing and a few post-processing tools. visualisation and scientific research. Such 3D reconstruction or 3D data acquisition form a laser scanning process involves high costs, manual labour and substantial expertise. On the other hand, Image-based 3D modelling photogrammetry software offers a comparatively inexpensive alternative and can handle the task with ease. Besides, documenting heritage artefacts with free and open-source software (FOSS) in supporting photogrammetry is getting popular for quality data production.

Getting It Right and Getting It Wrong in Digital Archaeological Ethics

Though the ethics of archaeological practice have changed over the life of the discipline (and have arguably become more robust), full consideration has not yet been given to how digital methodologies and the emergence of digital technologies have created new areas requiring ethical introspection. The pace of adoption of digitally centred archaeological data and digitally facilitated archaeological practice has not been met by the adoption of discipline-wide standards related to archaeological ethics. The result of this mismatch in ethics and practice is the creation of archaeologists who utilize digital forms, but whose archaeology is ungrounded in frameworks that specifically consider the ethical burdens of digital tools, methodology, and theory. This chapter details views of digital archaeological ethics related to digital archaeology as tools, digital archaeology as methodology, and digital archaeological pedagogy.