3D Digital Heritage Models as Sustainable Scholarly Resources

Erik Champion,Hafizur Rahaman

doi:10.3390/su11082425

Abstract

If virtual heritage is the application of virtual reality to cultural heritage, then one might assume that virtual heritage (and 3D digital heritage in general) successfully communicates the need to preserve the cultural significance of physical artefacts and intangible heritage. However, digital heritage models are seldom seen outside of conference presentations, one-off museum exhibitions, or digital reconstructions used in films and television programs. To understand why, we surveyed 1483 digital heritage papers published in 14 recent proceedings. Only 264 explicitly mentioned 3D models and related assets; 19 contained links, but none of these links worked. This is clearly not sustainable, neither for scholarly activity nor as a way to engage the public in heritage preservation. To encourage more sustainable research practices, 3D models must be actively promoted as scholarly resources. In this paper, we also recommend ways researchers could better sustain these 3D models and assets both as digital cultural artefacts and as tools to help the public explore the vital but often overlooked relationship between built heritage and the natural world.

Highlights

Sustainable digital cultural heritage has been considered a serious national issue in America [1]
From a group of 1483 conference papers, we selected 264, accounting for 17.9% of the total papers published in Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM), CAA, Committee of Architectural Photogrammetry (CIPA), European Mediterranean Conferences (EuroMed), and Digital Heritage Congress from 2012 to 2017
The single most effective way to increase public access to 3D digital models, we argue, is to develop various levels of copyright for 3D content that allow owners to share various levels of resolution of their 3D models and 3D data [26], along with incentives for them to share various levels of resolution and precision of those models. This survey not examined how digital heritage conference papers have addressed the issue of sustainability per se, but it indicated that the 3D models associated with these papers are not typically seen as worthy of preservation in their own right, which leads us to question both the sustainability of digital heritage as a serious scholarly activity and the pedagogical value of these 3D models

Summary

Introduction

Sustainable digital cultural heritage has been considered a serious national issue in America [1]. Sustaining digital libraries are a crucial issue [2], and these two concepts share common issues, including a problem with securing long-term funding and ensuring that users continually find the heritage collections (and library collections) useful and worthwhile. Virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality projects provide tantalizing new ways of engaging the public with the past [5]. While the original sites may have existed for hundreds or thousands of years, the digital models that underpin these digital projects have a limited shelf-life, and through designed obsolescence, perceived obsolescence, or the limitations of time, training, and resources, they are seldom successfully deployed in the classroom [6]

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