A v(irtual)-City implementation for promoting cultural heritage. (2015) - Tsoumanis, Georgios
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.