Enhancing the National Identity through Historic Buildings Conservation using VR Technology

The event organized by TOTAL, Indonesian Embassy in France, etc.International audienceIndonesia comprises the most extraordinary collections of cultural heritage within various historical places. Those heritage sites in all over Indonesia longingly present its own spirit of place, genius loci, as perform on its unique artifacts, and the community's cultural resources. The legacy of Indonesian collective past such as the built environment, artifacts, shrines and temples, buildings and monuments, sites and districts from the village to the center city are some significant heritages that very important for our national identity. Unfortunately, many heritage objects have been neglected towards the modernization. The conservation of old and historic buildings could prove to be difficult due to a lack of understanding of public. Public do not have a proper understanding of the significance of conserving heritage buildings and not aware of its integration possibilities with the ICTs as did by developed countries. Moreover, many relevant ICT developments in Indonesia are not specifically aimed for heritage preservation, so that people or even researchers and professionals may not be fully aware of the it developments and, therefore, are unprepared to adopt and adapt to the new technologies on this matter. Virtual reality (VR) is a specific emerging technology that can make a big difference on human thinking and highlighted to illustrate the possible new paradigms of presenting the past. The combination of interaction, immersion, and the digital computer make VR a unique medium for representing a building as well as a town in a certain time. Nowadays, VR offers many useful applications on building conservation and preservation that has greater attention from some governments, researchers and professionals. VR represents a high-end technology that has an exciting and explorative quality to complement more traditional methods of building reconstruction. Increasingly it is developing into a necessary component in architecture as tools to educate and to afford opportunities to learn and even experience historical environments, which for reasons of time and distance cannot be experienced or learnt in an engaging and meaningful way. VR's possible utility as a preservation tool derives from its potential to create virtual experiences that people may accept as substitutes for real visitation to a vanished and damaged building or threatened sites. This paper also describe a new approach technic to save our heritages using an advanced type of VR technologies, to introduced, to explored and to reveal its great potentials on preservation of historical buildings and areas. As VR is further integrated into conservation and preservation field new questions and challenges clearly will emerge. It is anticipated that the results from these innovation will enable everybody to deliver new concept of preserving valuable heritage to our society across the time, space and other boundaries with high efficiency and great ease in the future