Making cultural heritage more digitally accessible
Intuitive access to information regarding cultural environments is a major concern when it comes to new information society technologies. Virtual Reality technology offers an interactive and individual way to explore cultural and natural content via sight-seeing and guided tours of landscapes, architecture, literature and music. More automated and cost-efficient techniques are being explored through high-speed networks which can interconnect people from different cultures, creating information exchange on a global scale. Therefore up and coming digital cultural collections can offer a commonly shared experience of current and future cultural heritage archives to citizens across the world via immersive telepresence. The DHX project plans to create an intercommunicative virtual reality infrastructure and develop content for museums and cyber theatres for the common interchange of digital, cultural and natural heritage. Some of the cultural content prototypes include: "a virtual visit to Samaria gorge", "an Italian drama theatre", "virtual Baptistery of Pisa", and an "exploration of Beethoven's life and work". Various types of cultural and natural content derived globally are distributed through the use of elevated techniques in digital storytelling, novel paradigms in digital dramaturgy and collaborative interaction. Thus educational content can be offered in a highly stimulating and immersive way.
