“Databases and Virtual Environments: a Good Match for Communicating Complex Cultural Sites” by Borgatti, Calori, Diamanti, Felicori, Guidazzoli, et al. …

Virtual Reality, as an educational tool, is evolving through the prototyping stage, aspiring to become an everyday instrument. However, experimentation is not a concluded process and it is particularly important to develop meaningful applications, capable of satisfying the requirements from an extended range of users and across different platforms.

A complex VR application regarding several cultural sites of the city is currently under development and will constitute the basis of a Museum for Accessing the City of Bologna. The fundamental idea of this case study is visual mediation. Thus an interactive visual portal has been conceived to allow easy access to historical and cultural contents. The actual territory that the application can visualize is the second most important aspect, enabling users to put into relation different historical events and topics, gathered under the same contextual “roof”.

The framework presented here has been designed in order to eventually provide the access to already existing local digital products related to the same geographical area. Combining these resources in a visual geographical portal not only unifies a set of applications, but also constitutes a new way to manage and use Virtual Cultural Heritage. A visual and geographical access enables organization and communication of huge quantities of data related to the sites of interest. The aim of the project is to democratize the information even further, taking it outside the narrow space of the archives or of the specialized libraries and so delivering it to a wider and differentiated audience.