Transforming Cultural Heritage-A Digital Humanity Perspective with Virtual Reality

The study aims to explore a virtual reality (VR) approach representing a local history in the sense of preserving cultural heritage. Two 400-year fort cities, Tamsui and Keelung, located in northern Taiwan, were chosen and transformed into digital fort cities by the researchers from the fields of history, information sciences, and computer science. The researchers invited participants to the VR lab and experience a VR tour. Research tools used for collecting user data include before and after attitude scales and a post-task interview for each participants. The findings of the research revealed that the senses of joy, presence, and control could critically impact VR user experience. The design of the content needed to be more informative and interactive. Affordances in the immersive environment were key for the user to experience a smooth and positive user journey with less pain points. For future work, the next round of data collection will be carried out. Data will be compared and contrasted further to see the differences.