Title: A v(irtual)-City implementation for promoting cultural heritage

Authors: Georgios Tsoumanis; Eleni Kavvadia; Konstantinos Oikonomou

Addresses: Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece ' Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece ' Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece

Abstract: In this paper, virtual city (v-City) is presented, i.e., a virtual world consisting of historical buildings, monuments and other sites of a city, transformed into virtual sites (v-Sites). Additionally, avatars enliven v-City by acting like real habitats. Possible ways of implementing v-City as an educational and promotional tool are explored here. This is achieved by creating: 1) an application called v-isit; 2) video-based virtual tours (v-tours) consisting of parts of v-City. Both of them improve teaching history and promoting cultural heritage of the particular city, by using the latter v-Sites and avatars. Both v-Sites and avatars have the capability, through special virtual assistants (v-Assistants), of providing the viewers with pieces of information related to the particular site or the person represented by the avatar.

Keywords: virtual worlds; virtual sites; v-sites; avatars; cultural heritage promotion; virtual cities; video-based virtual tours; digital culture; history education.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCISTUDIES.2015.071185

International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies, 2015 Vol.4 No.2, pp.173 - 191

Received: 08 Oct 2014
Accepted: 06 Feb 2015

Published online: 16 Aug 2015 *

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