Model-driven generation of collaborative virtual environments for cultural heritage

Abstract

Collaborative Virtual Environments are experiencing a large interest in cultural heritage field mostly due to the strong opportunity given by novel augmented reality applications. There are already several examples of collaborative augmented visit to museums or historical sites. Anyway the traditional and static approach to computer graphics is very limiting because it often requires the development of a Virtual Environment for every new application. In this paper, we propose a technique for model-driven generation of mixed reality virtual environments, where every modification in contents, visit path and in interactions with the physical surrounding environment don't require a great re-coding effort, enabling fast deployment of collaborative virtual environments for cultural explorations only providing new contents and a small set of parameters. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.