Efficient and realistic cultural heritage representation in large scale virtual environments

The implementation of a virtual environment is challenging when the area to be covered is of large scale with existing objects such as historical buildings, castles, city neighbors, traditional villages etc. The desire for high fidelity is compromised by the computer machine limitations thus imposing a certain trade-off between fidelity and performance being thoroughly investigated in this work. In particular, although fidelity has to be reduced to achieve better performance, there are certain limits as its reduction is totally perceived and negatively judged by the users in case of close observation. Furthermore, immersion of a user is one of the essential elements for efficiently experiencing the cultural aspects of the implemented virtual environment. In this paper, the various phases (requirements, design and implementation) for constructing a large scale virtual environment that highlights cultural heritage aspects are presented and the results are being evaluated by user tests. To enable the expansion of the virtual environment over an extended area, the integration of GIS mechanisms is also proposed to guide users and enhance their experience. Segmentation of the virtual environment is also proposed to make development manageable and improve performance.