Re-using Open Data by Automatically Building Immersive Virtual Reality Worlds as Personal Museums

Abstract

While Open Data represent an important tool to ensuring transparency, they can also be the ground for the collaboration between Public Administrations (PAs) and citizens around shared objectives, such as Cultural Heritage preservation. In this paper, we present the work of our project Hetor, that is now entering year 2, that, after several fruitful co-creation activities, fostered by the PA but designed and realized by citizens (associations, schools, etc.), is now entering in a phase where the innovation in re-use is needed, by further engaging citizens through the appeal of a Virtual Personal Museum, i.e., a 3d virtual world where the data collected is presented as a museum and can be visited. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation of a tool VR-ReUse that allows to automatically create 3d Virtual Personal Museums, after a simple configuration, starting from the open datasets available. This is the next step of our engaging strategy, that will present the Virtual Personal Museums into the Town public Library in the month of April. We present the motivations to build such an innovative tool, the architecture, the examples, and their future development.