Supporting Online and On-Site Digital Diverse Travels

Abstract

Cultural-heritage research has created a vast amount of information regarding heritage objects and sites. At the same time, recent efforts on the digitization of cultural heritage have provided novel means of documenting tangible cultural resources including digital images, videos, audio testimonies, and 3D reconstructions. Furthermore, ethnographic research is nowadays combined with advanced capturing technologies such as motion capture to record the intangible dimensions of heritage as these are manifested through human expression in dance, heritage crafts, etc. This amount of information is now available and should be used to create novel forms of experiential access to cultural heritage powered by the web and mobile technologies mixed with novel interaction paradigms such as virtual and augmented reality. In this article, a platform is presented that facilitates a cloud-based web application to support location-based narratives on cultural-heritage resources provided through map-based or story-based representation approaches. At the same time, the platform through the power of modern mobile devices can provide these experiences on the move using location-based and image recognition-based augmented reality to facilitate multiple usage contexts. The platform was implemented to support the goal of the project CuRe, in the context of the “Greece-Germany” bilateral collaboration action.