Preserving and Presenting Cultural Heritage Using Off-the-Shelf Software

Abstract

The preservation and presentation of cultural heritage (CH) encompasses many domains and disciplines and ranges from tangible CH, traditionally taking the form of museum exhibits and historical sites that are open to the public to intangible CH, focussing on human and societal aspects of CH, as opposed to physical artefacts. The use of computer graphics (CG) and related techniques such as interactive virtual environments since the 1990s has had a profound impact on the presentation of and public engagement with CH, allowing virtual reconstruction of archaeological/historical sites as well as the virtual (re-)construction of culturally and historically relevant artefacts. These are frequently implemented using bespoke or proprietary systems, often explicitly created with a CH application in mind, which may require specialist expertise or significant investment. There exist, however, alternative approaches that can simplify and improve the uptake of CG for CH. In this chapter we discuss how off-the-shelf CG systems such as developer and artists’ tools for the entertainment industries, which are comparatively inexpensive, usually provide open developer licenses, and sometimes are even available free of charge, or affordable consumer-level hardware, can be used for the preservation and presentation of tangible and intangible CH, the application of which we illustrate with a set of case studies.