Digital Production Pipeline for Virtual Cultural Heritage Applications Using Interactive Storytelling

Abstract

Preserving the past within the collective memories of people is one of the ultimate goals of creative industries. Virtual cultural heritage applications recreate history by inviting users to travel back in time. One of the more popular approaches for enhancing the immersion of time-travellers within virtual environments is interactive digital story-telling, which enables users to learn while exploring. While the process of developing interactive digital story-telling applications is still complex, involving professionals from various artistic and scientific disciplines, significant technological advances have recently been made towards improving content production. Namely, advanced Earth observation systems are capable of capturing hundreds of thousands of points within a second, thus creating extremely accurate representations of artefacts such as cultural sites. Usually mounted on mobile and airborne platforms, they produce high-resolution point-clouds with densities ranging up to several hundred points per square meter. However, the lack of topology, huge data sizes, and the contained noise, requires new data processing, storage, and management approaches before these data can be successfully utilized. This chapter introduces an advanced pipeline for creating virtual worlds as environments for interactive digital story-telling applications. By considering the challenges and issues arising during this process, recent developments in content creation, warehousing, editing, and postproduction will be demonstrated through the usage scenario of the implemented end-user application.