NEW TOOLS FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE TOURISM: ACCESSIBLE VIRTUAL REALITY FOR MILAN’S BASILICA SANT’AMBROGIO

Although virtual reality provides much new unexplored territory for presenting and disseminating cultural heritage, operating VR headsets and controllers remains challenging for new users. By taking advantage of the tools available within the Unreal Engine game engine, the ergonomics of the Oculus Rift motion controllers, and certain principles of storytelling; one can develop a set of strategies for making the use of virtual reality more accessible and intuitive, allowing for new possibilities in the dissemination of built cultural heritage to a general audience. Therefore his paper aims to provide concrete examples of how to produce more effective VR tools for cultural heritage dissemination

Towards a structured selection of game engines for virtual environments

Development and maintenance of virtual reality engines are coupled with large effort. It is therefore common today, to use existing solutions originating from the entertainment sector. This is often a compromise, since they fulfill individual requirements only in parts, due to their different background. The decision for a specific engine can have a large effect on the effort required to implement own functionality. The number of existing engines further complicates decision making. To enable a comprehensible and replicable decision making, we propose a structured selection process. In a multi-step approach, first the requirements and criteria for comparison are identified and analyzed. A pre-filtering is then used to select a feasible number of engines which are then compared in detail