Exploring Cultural Heritage Using Virtual Reality

Virtual modelling featuring realistic, constructed environments has progressed significantly over the last decade and is largely used for scientific, educational and recreational purposes. Helped by gaming industry advances, 3D engines are continuously pushing the technological frontiers by providing more and more realistic environments, which allows increased interactions with users. In this context, a head-mounted display, such as Oculus Rift, facilitates interactivity allowing more realism in an immersive experience. This paper presents an innovative use of Oculus Rift, without any other connected device, in order to allow virtual mobility without constrained navigation. It also meant that visual item selection or information requests in a 3D scene could be done using a virtual pointer. This innovation brings an added value to the existing virtual reality experience by making it possible to streamline the interaction between the user and the model while valuing the intuitiveness and spontaneity of actions. The system might therefore be easy to handle even for a non 3D expert user. The main square of the city of Mons (Belgium), European Capital of Culture in 2015, was chosen as a case study to put the project into practice. The historical centre of the city has many architectural heritage buildings from the gothic and classical periods which constitute an ideal heritage site to work on. The virtual model was built with Rhino software and later imported into the Unity 3D real time engine to perform the animations and enable the 3D environment to interact with the Oculus Rift. The project proposes a virtual tour of the historical town centre where each building is described through audio storytelling. Each audio description informs the user about the cultural heritage value of the building under scope. The gaming experience has been tested by a group of children aged between 9 and 12. Although free to take a virtual walk around the main square, each user has to follow audio instructions and listen to indications in order to make the visit in a particular order. The assessment of the virtual tour through the learning outcome of the users is evaluated and discussed in this paper.