Virtual Reality Technology for Digitizing and Sustaining Tangible Historical and Cultural Heritage

The current decade is witnessing a noticeable revolution in developing smart technologies. These technologies have been widely used in addressing life’s issues and simplifying many aspects of our daily activities. Furthermore, sustainable development has become a global concern and is considered an important factor of life as the United Nations (UN) declared the 17 goals to achieve a sustainable world. This work uses sophisticated technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) to digitize, preserve, and sustain historical and cultural heritage. The main motivation behind this work is to protect the people’s beliefs, traditions, customs, and social values that identify their heritage. The main contribution of this work is exploring sample VR models for cultural and historical sites, and proposing a sample VR model for Qara Saray Palace, which is a distinguished cultural site in Mosul, Iraq. Also, it provides an intensive guide on how to integrate VR technology and cultural heritage in designing efficient VR models. Additionally, the work provides the detailed steps of building such models, which are of high interest to VR developers. The other contribution of this work is to meet the 11
^th
goal (Sustainable Cities and Communities) of the United Nations in sustainable development. Finally, performance evaluation metrics for VR applications are also presented and investigated.