Virtual Reality Usability and Accessibility for Cultural Heritage Practices: Challenges Mapping and Recommendations

A Collaborative Virtual Walkthrough of Matera's Sassi Using Photogrammetric Reconstruction and Hand Gesture Navigation

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for real-time, collaborative virtual tools to support remote activities across various domains, including education and cultural heritage. Virtual walkthroughs provide a potent means of exploring, learning about, and interacting with historical sites worldwide. Nonetheless, creating realistic and user-friendly applications poses a significant challenge. This study investigates the potential of collaborative virtual walkthroughs as an educational tool for cultural heritage sites, with a focus on the Sassi of Matera, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Italy. The virtual walkthrough application, developed using RealityCapture and Unreal Engine, leveraged photogrammetric reconstruction and deep learning-based hand gesture recognition to offer an immersive and accessible experience, allowing users to interact with the virtual environment using intuitive gestures. A test with 36 participants resulted in positive feedback regarding the application's effectiveness, intuitiveness, and user-friendliness. The findings suggest that virtual walkthroughs can provide precise representations of complex historical locations, promoting tangible and intangible aspects of heritage. Future work should focus on expanding the reconstructed site, enhancing the performance, and assessing the impact on learning outcomes. Overall, this study highlights the potential of virtual walkthrough applications as a valuable resource for architecture, cultural heritage, and environmental education.

Interactive Exploration of Virtual Heritage by Means of Natural Gestures

This paper is situated at the intersection of using Virtual Reality as a tool for cultural heritage preservation and using gesture interaction-based technology in order to achieve touchless, distant interaction of users with reconstructed artifacts. Various studies emphasize the positive effect on the cultural experience brought on by the use of Virtual Reality in a museum context. We build our approach on this idea, by modeling and reconstructing museum exhibits, both small artifacts and large architectural edifices. We propose and design navigation and interaction scenarios, at the same time taking into account present day limitations regarding social interaction, imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. By considering the user in the center of the experience and focusing on enabling him/her to adjust the perspective on the visualized artifacts and to freely interact with them through natural gestures, we allow the user to immerse in the virtual environment and interact with the reconstructed artifacts by means of simple hand gestures, with no touch. Finally, we assess the usability and utility of the Virtual Reality system in a questionnaire-based study with 137 participants over a period of 6 months, whose results we discuss in the paper.

VoRtex Metaverse Platform for Gamified Collaborative Learning

Metaverse platforms are becoming an increasingly popular form of collaboration within virtual worlds. Such platforms provide users with the ability to build virtual worlds that can simulate real-life experiences through different social activities. In the paper, we introduce a novel platform that provides assistive tools for building an educational experience in virtual worlds and overcoming the boundaries caused by pandemic situations. Therefore, the authors developed a high-level software architecture and design for a metaverse platform named VoRtex. VoRtex is primarily designed to support collaborative learning activities with the virtual environment. It is designed to support educational standards and it represents an open-source accessible solution developed using modern technology stack and metaverse concepts. For this study, we conducted a comparative analysis of the implemented VoRtex prototype and some popular virtual world platforms using Mannien’s matrix. Afterwards, based on the comparison, we evaluated the potential of the chosen virtual world platform and the VoRtex platform for online education. After an interactive demonstration of the VoRtex platform, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire form. The aim was to enable participants to identify the main advantages of online teaching using the VoRtex platform. Finally, the authors analyzed benefits and disadvantages of collaborative learning between the metaverse platform and real-world classroom sessions.