A Mixed Reality Approach to Visualizing Cultural Heritage Artefacts: Mixed Reality Approach to Cultural Heritage

Abstract

This paper reviews some existing technologies for mixed reality visualization of cultural and historical heritage artefacts. It describes a project, whose main aim is to virtually restore partly destroyed archaeological object by first building a 3D model of the original artefact and then rendering it on top of the real object in real world. It also proposes that when the user viewpoint does not change much in space, then cheaper hologram projecting technologies, like 3Dholonet or musion3D, originally designed for public performances, can be used for mixed reality visualization. A pilot project is being implemented, whose main idea is to build a virtual 3D model and project it as a hologram on top of the real object using two different technologies. The two resulting scenes will be evaluated by a group of pilot users, who will be asked to share their virtual experience and compare and rank the two approaches. The paper draws some conclusions and addresses future work