Virtualization of Digitalized Cultural Heritage and Use ... - Science Direct

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ScienceDirect Procedia Computer Science 77 (2015) 199 – 206

ICTE in Regional Development

Virtualization of digitalized cultural heritage and use case scenario modeling for sustainability promotion of national identity Arnis Cirulisa*, Lucio Tommaso De Paolisb, Mikheil Tutberidzec a

Sociotechnical Systems Engineering Institute of the Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Cesu str. 4, Valmiera, Latvia, LV-4200 b Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento, via Monteroni, Lecce, Italy, 73100 c Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, Ilia State University, Cholokashvili Ave. 3/5, Tbilisi, Georgia, 0162

Abstract Nowadays, in the digitalization era, it is becoming ever more pertinent to have reasonable use of digital content. This consideration should also apply to cultural heritage, not only conservation. In the context of globalization, smart actions for content use should be carried out to provide sustainability of national identities. In the last decades, new technologies have been developed and used for digital conservation in the form of three-dimensional computer models with varying size, starting from very small museum exhibits and ending with the largest cathedrals and castles. The benefits computer models are undeniable. By prototyping and reverse engineering, significant exhibits are developed providing possibilities not only to see, but also to hold in one’s hands and interact thereby allowing a better understanding of historical events and their meaning. Three-dimensional visualization provides virtual tours in different places and in different times. Unfortunately, development of such content is very expensive. Furthermore, technologies for a successful immersion level are in the development phase. This applies to criteria of content quality and availability and functionality of interaction. It is also vital to understand what elements to virtualize and how it lines up with the provision of national identity. Competition and tourism promotion conditions are undoubtedly a significant driving force for technological development, but, from an identity sustainability point of view, it is important that they go hand in hand. The aim of this research is to develop a baseline design for a set of technologies and the use of virtual and augmented reality to find recommendations for the sustainability of the national identity of countries via the prism of cultural heritage. Thereby providing planned and global technological solutions that are not aimed towards individual museums and separate objects of cultural heritage but focused on the overall region in the specialisation of ancient sites. © Published by Elsevier B.V. B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license © 2015 2016The TheAuthors. Authors. Published by Elsevier (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the Sociotechnical Systems Engineering Institute of Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences. Peer-review under responsibility of the Sociotechnical Systems Engineering Institute of Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected]

1877-0509 © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the Sociotechnical Systems Engineering Institute of Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences doi:10.1016/j.procs.2015.12.384

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Arnis Cirulis et al. / Procedia Computer Science 77 (2015) 199 – 206

Keywords: Visualization; Cultural heritage; Gamification, sustainability

1. Introduction The role of virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies is already increasing in other domains of economics day by day. Many people are familiar with the term virtual reality, but are unsure about the uses of this technology. Gaming is an obvious virtual reality application as are virtual worlds, but there are a whole host of uses for virtual reality – some of which are more challenging or unusual than others. Already it is common to use VR/AR technologies in the military, in education, in healthcare, in entertainment, in fashion, in tourism and heritage, in business, in engineering, sport, in media, scientific visualisation, in telecommunications, in construction and in film, but now opportunities and innovations appear also in other sectors related to VR/AR use cases. As reported by DigiCapital1, the increase in total revenue is predicted to be very impressive, especially for augmented reality (AR) solutions. This is proof that our society will be more and more equipped with state of the art technologies, like high performance smart phones with depth cameras and portable wireless head mounted displays. Consequently, our research team are looking forward to integrating VR/AR technologies in the project tasks for successful achievements and to provide richer interpretations of the past, bringing new perspectives to questions of identity and culture, and generating societal and economic benefits. With regard to use cases for cultural heritage, this refers to the use of VR/AR in museum and historical settings, e.g. visitor centres. These settings employ interaction as a means of communicating information to the general public in new and exciting ways. There has been a move away from the traditional type of experience associated with museums, galleries and visitor centres. The old model was that of passive engagement in which people viewed the exhibit/s but did not get involved in an experience where interaction is the main feature. Interactive displays form a large part of many exhibitions and particularly appeal to children. Children are often difficult to attract to a museum or gallery as they tend to see this as a boring experience. But the use of interactive technologies such as virtual reality has changed that perception and opened up these spaces to a new audience. The general research goal is to support and promote access to and reuse of digital cultural heritage resources. Technologies and tourism activities are key components to foster this process. Culture, heritage and the arts has long attracted people to tourist destinations. This trend is evident in the rise in the volume of tourists who seek adventure, culture, history, archaeology and interaction with local people. Cultural heritage tourism is important for various reasons; it has a positive economic and social impact, it establishes and reinforces identity, it helps preserve the cultural heritage. In the design to research and develop cultural heritage tourism, a number of objectives can be met within the context of sustainable tourism. This will depend on the consultations and expressed desires and concerns of the local community stakeholders. Heritage tourism involves visiting historical or industrial sites that may include old canals, railways, battlegrounds, river markings, ancient sites (ancient groves, springs, stones, trees, etc.) and so forth. The overall purpose is to gain an appreciation of the past. It also refers to the marketing of a location to members of a diaspora who have distant family roots there. For example, Wright2,3 found that visiting the land of one’s forefathers, findings one’s Irish roots, and enjoying Irish culture and heritage, are significant motivators for Irish-American visitors to Ireland. 2. Concept and approach The main tasks involve a deepened analysis on world practice in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and gamification use cases for tourism and cultural heritage promotion. Another task is the evaluation of the technological framework for physical and logical structure for virtualization of ancient sites in engaging scenarios. For this and later sections an important aspect is that interdisciplinarity methodologies must be taken into account4,5,6 and that ICT specialists form a team together with cultural heritage specialists. In line with the considerations discussed above in the field of cultural heritage sustainability and the importance of technologies, the following objectives are formulated:


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Promotion of cross-sectoral collaboration between ICT (information and communications technologies) and cultural heritage researchers for new innovations; Improvement of a way of cultural heritage content delivery with sustainable approach; Public involvement in an entertaining and active way to understand the meaning of cultural heritage assets; The increase of immersion for professionals and common users in different historical periods. Main tasks to achieve the above-mentioned objectives are: Evaluation of the technological framework for physical and logical structure to support virtualization of ancient sites in engaging scenarios. Development of a model. Verification and validation. Advanced integration of three-dimensional virtual and augmented reality visualizations. Group scenarios for educational institutions and the public, and the realization of team activities. Requirements specification and design of an online ancient site gamification management platform. Integration of virtual and augmented reality functionality for indoor and outdoor scenario activities. Objective and task achievement integration scenarios are described in the following sections. 3. Development of recommendation model Main tasks involve the collection of ancient site databases and classification of data types used for gamification scenarios, classification of criteria for the recommendation model and the development of a dynamic model. Sustainable use of cultural heritage resources (ancient sites) in the form of educational and entertaining scenarios is closely related to tourism and sustainable tourism7. As depicted in the functional schema in fig.1, important responsibilities rely on a dynamic model. For this reason the modelling practise is analysed in the tourism sphere. This will be later related and used for development of a dynamic model for object and region involvement suggestions in virtualization scenarios. From a geographical point of view, tourism is basically flows in a spatial system linking together a place of origin and a destination and the impacts on these destinations induced by tourism. Forecasting tourism flows requires reliable data. In addition, lack of data makes it difficult to forecast tourism from a scientific point of view. Forecasting is dependent on time series of data. Forecasting with structural models has the aim to explain how changes in society and the surrounding environment affect tourism. Structural models cannot be applied if data on tourism only contains information on impact and activities without concerning socio-economic data on tourists8.

Fig.1. Functional schema for technological solution

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Based on the aforementioned facts and conclusions, the role of a dynamic model in this discipline is very important. As depicted in fig.2, the model should accept data about ancient sites in the form of geographical areas and specific elements. To provide sustainability in ancient site use, criteria analysis and influence calculations are an integral part as well. The entire process produces dynamic model calculations and a prediction engine, which serves as a central core to respect criteria values and bring out the suggested element list for virtualization. Element lists are different for tourism needs, public use and research needs. Virtualization in the research context is used as a term for real world element transformation to virtual and augmented reality objects, usually in the form of computer based three dimensional models.

Fig.2. Input and output data by dynamic model GA- geographical area (country, region) El – element (ancient groves, springs, stones, trees, etc.); SC - Sustainability criteria (climate, surrounding population, accessibility, restriction level, durability etc. ); Cv – criteria value

4. Sustainability scenarios through gamification and interactivity Since a basis for virtual environment scenarios is needed, this section discusses the development of multienvironmental gamification scenarios with advancements of three-dimensional virtual and augmented reality visualizations. Specific scenarios include group scenarios for educational institutions and realization of team activities. Games and game technologies increasingly transcend the traditional boundaries of their medium, as evidenced by the growth of serious and pervasive games as an industry and research field. Gamification improve user experience and user engagement in non-game services and applications9. An increasing number of applications use game design elements to motivate user behaviour in non-game contexts. Plenty of modern day examples prove that entertainment gaming could be used for serious gaming to educate people through new experiences. For example, the Minecraft (minecraft.net) phenomenon captivates new and new users of different age. New ideas appear on how to use this so users can benefit more. Denmark created a map in Minecraft for urban planning and discussions with society in a novel way. This involves big data processing technologies as well but more importantly it opens new doors to innovative ideas that will be achieved also in this project in the future. To achieve these ideas gamification needs its own framework of design tools and methods, apart from games design or traditional user experience design. The tools can be adopted from a relevant domain, but it requires adjusting and fine-tuning to better describe the needs and goals of a gamification user, rather than simply combining a player’s needs with a user’s requirements.


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Game developers have identified, explored, and discussed many of the key issues that arise for players interacting in game worlds and the physical world. In user centred design, the integration of knowledge of player work practices, preferences etc. into the design process are crucial to success. Geocaching is a technology - supported treasure hunt activity that uses a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or a smartphone with a Geocaching application to find something hidden by other players (Geocaching.com). The results provide a deeper understanding of enjoyment in real - time gaming played in the physical world; along with the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the Geocentric application and users experience the Geocaching game in a tourism context10. Game systems have been implementing a range of features as part of their design to encourage engagement and interaction from users. With the growth of online social networking services, it has been observed through indirectly studying behaviours that users have repurposed features of online social networking such as statistics and user profiles–in a game-like fashion to drive the flow of information. A key factors in the platform being developed is to integrate a variety of scenario pools (see fig. 3.) to increase interactivity and suitability for different user groups.

Fig.3. Potential scenarios and components placed in real and virtual environment

Ancient site augmentations will be used on the real site outdoor environment and will also include onsite virtual reality quizzes based on ancient events. In this case we bring playing ideas to a new level bringing some extract of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) to outdoor environment. 5. Engagement platform with future ICT solutions The planned result is an online ancient site gamification management platform design and development for public use with an intuitive interface and different levels of interaction depending on available devices and the location of participants. Visualization and interaction technologies for immersive environments are in constant development. Complex and realistic virtual worlds can now be handled thanks to significant advances in computer graphics and modelling. Since virtual reality (VR) has become possible, it has been assisting professionals in several areas of spatial exploration, for instance architecture. Historic reconstruction of monuments and buildings of the past, which are fading with time, is now possible with 3D modelling software and VR tools. Moreover, augmented reality (AR) allows studying and understanding environments that no longer exist in the place they once were. There are many commercial and open source game engine platforms in which to develop new environments. The challenge of this project (fig.4.) will be to find the most appropriate game engine that has compatibility or integration potential in web based applications and interfaces. Besides virtual reality, also the integration of augmented reality functionality is important. The project team will look at open source projects, for example, Irrlicht

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Engine, Ogre3D, Torque 3D or Cocos2d-x; however, other game engines or virtual reality authoring platforms are considered, especially those with SDKs (software development kit) integrated to develop software modules for new functionalities. In this case a good option is Unity, which is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies and used to develop video games for PC, consoles, mobile devices and websites. In many cases game engines provide a suite of visual development tools in addition to reusable software components. These tools are generally provided in an integrated development environment to enable simplified, rapid development of games in a data-driven manner. Game engine developers attempt to "pre-invent the wheel" by developing robust software suites which include many elements a game developer may need to build a game. Most game engine suites provide facilities that ease development, such as graphics, sound, physics and AI functions. These game engines are sometimes called "middleware" because, as with the business sense of the term, they provide a flexible and reusable software platform which provides all the core functionality needed, right out of the box, to develop a game application while reducing costs, complexities, and time-to-market — all critical factors in the highly competitive video game industry11. However, the project still does not claim to be a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, but some aspects from the architecture side must be considered during the design process as well, because network and multi user capability should be provided, but in a more static, rather than a dynamic way.

Fig.4. Use of mobile devices for virtual and augmented reality scenarios

WebGL is the standard 3D graphics API for the web. It allows developers to harness the full power of the computer’s 3D rendering hardware from within the browser using JavaScript. Before WebGL, developers had to rely on plugins or native applications and ask their users to download and install custom software in order to deliver a hardware-accelerated 3D experience. While WebGL is not in the official HTML5 specification, it is shipped with most browsers that support HTML5. Like Web Workers, Web Sockets and other technologies outside the official


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W3C recommendations, WebGL comes with the package; the developers at Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Blackberry consider 3D an essential component for making the browser into a first-class application platform. WebGL works on the majority of desktops, as well as a growing number of mobile browsers. There are millions of WebGL-enabled seats already installed, most likely including the machines you run at home and in your office. There are numerous sites under development, with applications including games, data visualization, computer-aided design, 3D printing, and consumer retail. WebGL is a low-level drawing API: you supply it with arrays of data and a shader, and tell it to draw. Anyone used to a graphics API like the 2D Canvas will find the lack of high-level constructs mystifying at first. However, there are several open source JavaScript toolkits that provider higher-level accesses to the API to make it look more like a traditional drawing library. Even with a toolkit, 3D is still hard work— but these tools at least make approachable for folks with limited 3D development experience; and for experienced 3D developers, they are definitely time-savers. If we bring together Unity and WebGL then the WebGL build option allows Unity to publish content as JavaScript programs using HTML5 and WebGL, which can then be run by supported web browsers. But it is not only about scenarios, rendering and 3D models, the unsolved challenge of this project is also the depiction of three dimensional objects of different size in outdoor environments, ancient site element position detection that depends on the participant's distance and viewing angle. The traditional approach with fiducial markers cannot be used; it is suitable for indoor solutions in short distances. That is why sensor markerless tracking will be introduced as the most appropriate solution for outdoor environment (not separate objects) augmentation. GPS localization and internal sensor (accelerometer, electronic compass, and gyroscope) data calculation is key for successful virtual object placement to provide immersion in an ancient site environment. 6. Conclusion Technology has had a great impact on tourism as well as other sectors affiliated with tourism and cultural heritage. These are sectors such as transport, communication and tours. Over the years, the use of technology in tourism has been enhanced uniquely to provide very exclusive services all across the globe. In the recent past when technology was rarely used in the tourism sector, most services were of very poor quality and equally unreliable. However, with time technology has gone a long way in improving the quality of service delivery in the tourism sector. There are many similarities that exist between tourism and technology. For starters, these sectors are mutually dependent on each other and are advancing towards the same direction. Devices such as tablets and laptops developed using technology have had a great influence on the use of social media in tourism which in turn has brought about great growth in the sector. This paper described enhancements which are based on interactive virtual and augmented reality technologies based on gamification scenarios. There are augmented reality (AR) solutions for mobile devices that help users to find information about tourism objects. By use of a smart phone’s video camera, screen and internal sensors, realtime video frames are merged with two dimensional data, like pictures and text descriptions. However it is just information search and depiction, without participants’ engagement and motivation to actually locate the actual place in nature. That is why gamification scenarios, which integrate the use of mobile devices and other gadgets for reasonable prices for the wider public, play an important role. Besides interaction and scenario task solving, the team looks forward not only to two dimensional augmentations (photos and text), but also to 3D (three dimensional) augmentations, which include static 3D models of ancient sites and dynamic animated 3D models. For onsite VR (virtual reality) passive HMD frames combined with smart phones can be used. Contents in VR scenarios are based on 360 degree photos and videos with active fields for quizzes and clues. However the main goal of the project is that physical architecture will be placed on mobile solutions. Solution integration for active HMDs like OculusRift is also planned.

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Dr. Arnis Cirulis is a researcher at Sociotechnical Systems Engineering institute of Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences and is responsible for research in field of VR/AR (virtual and augmented reality) technologies. He is head of the Virtual Reality Technologies laboratory where projects related to industrial training, urban planning, logistics, tourism and entertainment are piloted. He holds Dr.sc.ing in 2012 and he is also an assistant professor of the Faculty of Engineering. Dr. Lucio Tommaso De Paolis is an Assistant Professor of Information Processing Systems and the scientific responsible of the AVR Laboratory of the Department of Engineering for Innovation of the University of Salento. His research interest concerns the computer-aided surgery (CAS) and the human-computer interaction (HCI). This study is focused on the applications of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies in medicine and surgery for the development of accurate models of the patient, the building of realistic simulators for surgical training and the design of systems for the preoperative planning and image-guided surgical navigation. Dr. Mikheil Tutberidze is an Associated Professor of Computer Science, Ilia State University and researcher at Niko Muskhelishvili Institute of Computational Mathematics. His doctor degree is in computational mathematics. Main research areas involve computational methods, cryptography and optimization methods. His knowledge and experience in solving games using mathematical methods is useful for game scenarios in virtual reality.