Sense of Place in Architectural Virtual Heritage Environment
The use of computer technology in the field of cultural heritage broadly defined as virtual heritage (VH), gives new meanings to heritage preservation and conservation efforts. One of the key values with significant potentials in portraying the richness of the architectural heritage is highlighting...
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| Format: | Thesis |
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2016
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| Summary: | The use of computer technology in the field of cultural heritage broadly defined as virtual heritage (VH), gives new meanings to heritage preservation and conservation efforts. One of the key values with significant potentials in portraying the richness of the architectural heritage is highlighting the sense of place. While technology and digital tools to support VH are rapidly improving, there is still a paucity of research on the suitability of user features in VH representation and the need of finding means to support a sense of place in architectural virtual heritage environment (VHE). This study initially discusses the theoretical issues and complexities in defining the sense of place, not only in the virtual context but also to its physical counterpart. Then, a comparative case study of twelve published VH projects was conducted focusing on the structure of the virtual environment (VE) that was used to represent and visualise the heritage places. The qualitative review focused on the contextual setting, navigation, interactivity, level of details (LOD), viewpoints and auditory elements. The results from the case studies provided some insights into the current trends and issues in VH contents development, which will assist the development of the VH model in the subsequent experiment stage. Next, qualitative experiments on user’s sense of place experience in a VHE were conducted to analyse user’s real-time feedbacks from three levels of virtual immersion. The results from the experiment have shown that being fully immersed in a VHE does not necessarily allow particular place essence to be felt without a comprehensive reconstruction of a virtual place. |
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