VIRTUAL HERITAGE IN TIME, SPACE AND PLACE

Maurizio Forte, University of California, Merced,

Virtual Heritage can define all the digital processes connected with a multidisciplinary approach to the interpretation, knowledge and communication of cultural heritage. The interpretation and communication process is created by spatial-temporal coordinates but it depends on the sense of place transmitted through cross-cultural domains. This gap of distance in time, space and place between present and past can be partially filled by a virtual reality environment, where the simulation is able to reproduce a holistic context of the cybernetic information. This simulation represents a possible past and the interaction determines the level of communication and exchange with the space (uncoded), first, and the place (coded), then. The result of the mutual eco-interaction and feedback between users and environment constitutes the virtual heritage process.

VR, for now mainly offline, but destined to migrate and settle permanent on the web, constitutes the concluding  segment of a process of knowledge-communication, precisely because it is able to produce first difference, then knowledge and communication. “If information is a ‘difference that produces difference,’ then the domain of information is balanced between too much and too little difference. On the one hand, information is difference and thus where there is no difference, there is no information; on the other hand, information is a difference which produces a difference”(BATESON, 1979). Most part of the world seems to be interested mainly towards technological and digital aspects of the Virtual, but this direction is over-technological without a correct evaluation of the relations between mind and environment. We’d like imagine the Virtual like a 3D cyberspace in which artificial organisms and humans interact, move, grow on the basis of rules of the artificial societies and of the relations of the ecosystems; the realm of the Virtual, in technical sense, includes all the 3D worlds where the action/reaction/retroaction is free and in real time.

There are some promising and innovative research paths in this field such as: VR Web GIS, Virtual Communities, Cybergames, and multiuser collaborative environments. In this paper an overview of archaeological case studies concerning VR multiuser applications will be presented, from the micro scale (monument or intra-site) to the macro scale (landscape).