Interactive Environment for Virtual Heritage Using Augmented Reality

Abstract

Culture history of a nation is in their artist's hands, writers, musicians and architects who developed and protected the ancients teaching throughout the life of a nation. Also the things that they developed and protected are the root of the whole social population and future of the nation. Conserving and restoring the artistic patrimony is preserving the cultural history of any people. But because of the present events such as human activities and environmental changes, the artistic patrimonies are being ruined time by time. Therefore a perfect technology to conserve and restore artistic patrimonies is required. Virtual heritage is the most appropriate available technology to preserve culture history and mainly, it is a descendent of virtual reality. The dig- ital models of Michelangelo's Florentine Piet`a and Michelangelo's David are some miracle examples came from virtual heritage. But each of these projects has one quality; each model is presented in immersive way just as only a virtual object. This is caused to output only low realistic models and that is a huge draw back in the virtual heritage. In this research, we have overtaken this drawback by presenting augmented reality as an environment to build virtual heritages. Also we present a low cost approach to build aug- mented reality systems and how the augmented reality can be aligned with virtual heritage. Also a low cost hybrid tracking technique is presented to gain a proper real time view from the system. Augmented reality is a technology which supplements reality, rather than completely replacing. An augmented reality system combines the real scene viewed by user with the virtual scene generated by the computer and presents a composite view for the user. Therefore it emphasizes the hu- man senses to think as the virtual scene and real scene, as one with same qualities. In this, our main concern was in three areas, building augmentation vi- sion and presenting it, tracking user's position and orientation and modeling artistic patrimonies. Each of these can be achieved in many ways, but be- cause of the cost factor, low cost approaches are followed in this project. IR tracking with lens formula is used for tracking user's position and orienta- tion and enhanced open source AR libraries are used to build augmentation vision and present it.