Travel in virtual worlds

You could see places deep down in the ocean as well as high up in the mountains or even travel back in time. 

One such example is the sunken "Villa con Ingresso a Protiro” within the underwater Archaeological park of Baiae near Naples in Italy. It was built during Roman times and today, thanks to virtual worlds technologies, it is possible to visit it without needing a diving certificate. EU-funded research project iMareCulture, led by the Cyprus University of Technology, has made a virtual tour of how the villa looks like today and how it probably looked like in its glory days.

There are also local places that where you can go and travel back in time, such as the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany. They have apps that help the visitor follow the exhibition, but also apps to do educational gaming about ice age that you can access from home. They participated in a drive by EU-funded project DOORS museum booster, which helped small museums to further digitise the experiences they offer to visitors. Several other museums, art galleries and monuments and sites offer 360-degree online tours.

Objects and even buildings and important sites can be digitised, in two-dimension pictures, but also in three-dimension (3D). It serves more than one purpose. A 3D model of a monument allows people to visit it virtually and potentially entice them to see it for real. A digital twin of a monument, which is a more elaborated digital model taking into account its evolution and parameters, can be used to reconstruct it if it is damaged by a fire or an earthquake, or purely for research purposes.

SMEs in the tourism sector are very interested in new emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence or virtual worlds to create new applications and services. Up to 400 SMEs in the tourism sector are expected to benefit from support from EU-funded research project EURO-EMOTUR with the digital transformation of their businesses using unique methodology that combines using virtual worlds technologies to find out how tourists react to the experienced offered by the company and marketing.

A place to find 3D models is the common European data space for cultural heritage funded by the European Commission. Together with the European initiative and the Member States, they are working to populate the data space with 3D assets from the cultural heritage sector, representing monuments, sites and objects from all over Europe.

Last year they launched the Twin-It campaign to accelerate the use and re-use of 3D in the common European data space by raising awareness of the opportunities and benefits and to help build capacity of EU Member States heritage institutions. You can read more about Twin-It, and see their virtual 3D-museum, on the Europeana website.

Learn more about 3D

Basic principles and tips for 3D digitisation of cultural heritage was elaborated by the European Commission and the Expert Group on Digital Cultural Heritage and Europeana. It is geared toward cultural heritage professionals, institutions and regional authorities in charge of Europe's precious cultural heritage who want to digitise cultural heritage content.

The study on quality in 3D digitisation of tangible cultural heritage, led by Cyprus University of Technology developed an app to help cultural heritage institutions plan the digitisation of cultural heritage. It also explains the correlation between quality and complexity when digitising an object, site or monument in 3D.