The Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH) represents a resource with huge, but yet largely unexploited, potentials for the maritime and coastal tourism.
In the last 10 years, national and international government authorities are supporting and strengthening research activities and development strategies, plans and policies to make underwater archaeological sites’ exploitation more sustainable and accessible to large-scale tourism.
To this end, the paper presents an outcome of the Virtual and augmented exploitation of Submerged Archaeological Sites (VISAS) project that allows users to explore underwater archaeological sites. In particular, the virtual diving system combines the advantages offered by Virtual Reality (VR) technologies and the latest three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction techniques to create virtual tours for the exploitation of the UCH.
User studies’ results demonstrate that the proposed VR system is able to provide a playful learning experience, with a high emotional impact, and it has been well appreciated by a large variety of audiences, even by younger and inexperienced users.
Published by: BBCC
Date: 16-04-2020