Cultural Heritage in Fully Immersive Virtual Reality

Abstract

Fully immersive virtual reality (VR) applications have modified the way people access cultural heritage—from the visiting of virtual museums containing large collections of paintings to the visiting of ancient buildings. In this paper, we propose to review the software that are currently available that deal with cultural heritage in fully immersive virtual reality. It goes beyond technologies that were available prior to virtual reality headsets, at a time where virtual was simply the synonym of the application of digital technologies to cultural heritage. We propose to group these applications depending on their content—from generic art galleries and museums to applications that focus on a single artwork or single artist. Furthermore, we review different ways to assess the performance of such applications with workload, usability, flow, and potential VR symptoms surveys. This paper highlights the progress in the implementation of applications that provide immersive learning experiences related to cultural heritage, from 360 images to photogrammetry and 3D models. The paper shows the discrepancy between available software to the general audience on various VR headsets and scholarship activities dealing with cultural heritage in VR.