Applying mixed reality technology to cultural applications: Presentation held at the International Workshop on Information and Communication Technologies 2003, Athen

Cultural organisations such as museums and galleries face the situation that they have to compete for the favour of visitors or the public in general with numerous suppliers of different educational or entertaining offers. As a consequence, they are looking for new ways of presentation to increase demand for cultural related edutainment.This paper intends to promote the idea of applying mixed reality technology to cultural applications. Hence, it describes two scenarios of new ways for presentation and interaction that adopt existing technologies to cultural application demonstrations. Consequently, it does not provide detailed algorithmic or scientific background, as this is out of the scope of this paper. The first example describes a Mixed Reality-supported interactive museum exhibit. It features an easy and intuitive interaction via pointing gesture and allows the museum visitor to explore artworks in a highly interactive way. The second example applies Augmented Reality (AR) technology to the cultural domain. In this scenario an application concept for a virtual art exhibition in the real museum or gallery environment is proposed. Gallery or museum visitors will be enabled to enter a number of virtual art exhibitions, which consist of digitised pieces of art, and paintings that complement the real exhibitions