Abstract
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) has a very picturesque past. Founded in 11th century, it has always been a crossroads of faiths and civilizations. Extended Reality (XR) technologies can finally take us to time travel into this history, enable us to experience past events and meet historical characters. In this paper, we overview the latest applications we developed that use Virtual Reality (VR) video, Virtual and Augmented Reality (AR) for interactive digital storytelling about BH history. “Nine dissidents” is the first BH VR documentary, tackling a still tricky subject of dissidents in the Socialist Yugoslavia, artists and writers falsely accused, persecuted and still forbidden. “Virtual Museum of Old Crafts” aims to present and preserve crafts intangible heritage through Virtual Reality. “Battle on Neretva VR” is recreating a famous WWII battle offering the users to experience it and meet comrade Tito, the commander of the Yugoslav Liberation Army. “Sarajevo 5D” shows the cultural monuments from Sarajevo that do not exist anymore in physical form using Augmented Reality. Through user experience studies, we measure the user immersion and edutainment of these applications and show the potential of XR for the presentation and preservation of cultural heritage.
Highlights
On clicking on the arrow positioned on the street pavement, the user moves to the second virtual environment, a Virtual Reality (VR) video of Baščaršija square, where the story about crafts recorded in the oldest census from the 15th century is told
The framework questionnaire contains four sections: (1) introductory part with demographic data, (2) questions assessing “completeness of interaction”, (3) main part for evaluation made up of 3 sub-scales addressing immersion and edutainment linked to Performance Expectancy (PE), and usability satisfaction linked to Effort Expectancy (EE); and (4) open questions where users can express their opinion about the presentation and the most favourable and the most problematic parts
Four projects we described brought our users back to the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina and recreated objects, events and characters from its past
Summary
The high immersivity of VR headsets transfers the users into a different place and time, but they need to be offered content that can use the potential of this technology and recreate life in virtual environments. We will present the VR documentary “Nine dissidents”, which deals with the problem of intellectuals persecuted in the socialist Yugoslavia for their dissent with the regime As this is the first BH VR film, we will describe what we learned during the production and what elements of the new film language grammar we defined. The hyper storytelling methodology [4] brings historical information closer to the users while obtaining a high level of edutainment We believe that this combination could be used in other areas of life, such as education and journalism. The workflows described in this paper can be reused in various kinds of applications
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