Natural interaction in VR environments for Cultural Heritage and its impact inside museums: The Etruscanning project

A basic limit of most Virtual Reality (VR) applications reproducing cultural sites developed by the scientific community is that they often fail to fire up the attention and the involvement of the public. Starting from our experience in this domain, we would like to discuss some of the fundamental concepts about the potentiality of virtual ecosystems and to propose new natural interaction interfaces in VR environments based on body movements. The system we will describe has been derived from the new generation of games, but for the first time, it has been applied to VR environments dedicated to Cultural Heritage (CH) and experimented with inside museums. Interesting research focused on the definition of a new grammar of gestures is in progress, allowing more and more complexity, but with natural interchanges and connections between real and virtual worlds. An important development in this field has been realized in the framework of the Etruscanning project, a European project (Culture 2007) whose aim is to explore the possibilities of new visualization techniques, in order to re-create and restore the original context of the Etruscan graves. In this paper, we will discuss the methodological approach and the VR application dedicated to Regolini Galassi tomb, in the Sorbo necropolis in Cerveteri. Finally, we will present the results of the evaluation of the VR installation presented inside the museums, derived from public feedback. This observation lasted several months and gave us the opportunity to adjust the grammar of gestures and the general infrastructure of the application in order to define and implement the most efficient solution for people.