Mixed Reality for Cultural Heritage

In this paper we present two different approaches with Mixed (Virtual and Augmented) Reality to give pupils an understanding of ancient Greek culture and history in a motivating way. We identify the possibilities of AR in a museum for ancient statues to represent virtual information and to guide the visitor. Moreover, we discuss typical issues of mobile and stationary Virtual Reality (VR) systems in the context of public usage within schools and museums. Additionally, a new VR-streaming approach called SaMaXVR is presented that combines the benefits of mobile and stationary consumer ready VR systems in terms of usability, maintenance, safety and graphics-quality by mitigating many of their individual disadvantages when used in daily business. As this streaming solution consists of cost-effective hardware, this approach can be seen as a valuable and affordable alternative for schools, museums and students. To demonstrate its potential, an application was developed that visualizes complex 3D scans of cultural heritage in their former original environment to give users the possibility to travel back in time (and place) to see how the artifacts might have looked like in the past.