Written by Sydney Leslie

Virtual reality (VR) has quickly become a mainstay for exhibiting arts and cultural organizations. When looking at it as a concept, “VR has the potential to simulate imaginative and existing physical environments along with their processes. The simulations can be tuned to a highest level of multisensorial realism in order to affect users' visual, auditory, tactile, vestibular, and even olfactory and gustatory senses.” But what does it mean to museums and cultural organizations, and how can it help the arts?

Current use VR Cultural Heritage

There are several museums based entirely around VR, including the Museum of Other Realities, a fully virtual museum, Google Arts & Culture has their own database of world sites, and Open Heritage, which takes advantage of aspects of VR, allowing users to see the sites in 3D view. While the ethics of virtual reality are often debated, cultural heritage specialists have found a special place for it in site recreations, many of which are at the risk of destruction in real life.

Open Heritage is just one of several online-available recreations of cultural heritage sites. It presents 26 different realistic sites and explorable 3D locations. Some of these locations include “parts of the Roman city of Pompeii,” “Native American cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in southern Colorado,” and the “1000 year old Temple of Kukulcan in the Mayan city of Chichén Itzá.” These virtual locations have views of the sites in their current state, as well as how they may have looked in active use centuries or millennia ago. In addition to Google’s Open Heritage service, several other institutions have toyed with their own versions of VR recreations, including TIME and National Geographic. TIME’s work, which was actually a preview for a film by British director Christopher Nolan, used VR to transport the user into the Battle of Dunkirk during the second World War. National Geographic’s immersive virtual reality experiment looks into Viking culture, placing the user in the middle of a Viking “fighting pit.” While these two examples are action-packed, VR is also being used by arts and cultural organizations for more observational purposes, such as the aforementioned site recreations. For example, Australian archaeologist Simon Young created a VR recreation of several different Roman ruin sites. The VR experience allows visitors at these Roman ruins to look through VR and see what the site looked like centuries ago. Young’s recreation can be accessed via smartphone and plugged into a portable smartphone VR headset. 

These smartphone VR headsets, and other recently popularized VR headsets, have changed the means of accessibility towards VR, making it much easier for cultural institutions to find and use immersive reality experiences in “educational, explorative, and exhibition enhancement purposes.” Virtual reality is a rapidly changing and growing technology, but the creation of these portable headsets have given a baseline for museums and other institutions to use as a model. According to Erik Champion and Mafkereseb Kassahun Bekele, user engagement “is related to the ability of the virtual environment to enable engaging experiences as a result of the combination of immersivity and intuitive interaction with the cultural context in the virtual environment.” The relevant cultural context and immersivity of VR in this application is what enhances the learning experience for the user. In addition, it has been made accessible to museums that otherwise would not have the ability to represent these sites or their artifacts. 

Encouraging Cultural Presevation

The use of VR recreations for cultural heritage sites has become crucial in preserving public memory, as many are at risk of destruction. One main concern for preservationists is the destruction of war in countries such as Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria. In a statement made by Michael Danti of the Syrian Heritage Initiative at the American Society of Oriental Research, he described the destruction of war as “the worst cultural heritage emergency since World War II…here we see how technologies can be used not only to document the making – and unmaking – of heritage, but also to rebuild it; both materially and in the imagination.” In Syria, the Islamic State “has sped the pace of looting by encouraging professional looters with heavy machinery and archeological knowledge to dig archeological sites in return for payment to [the Islamic State] of a 20% ‘tax’ on the value of what they find.” This looting generate profit and encourages destruction, serving as a violent reminder that there is no alternative in their world. Thus, the creation of virtual realities surrounding these heritage sites has growing in importance.

As of 2016, VR and cultural specialists have been working together to recreate these sites to preserve their existence in time after their destruction. The Institute of Digital Archaeology, a joint project between Oxford, Harvard, and the Museum of the Future (Dubai) created a 3D virtual model of a Roman arch destroyed by the Islamic State in Palmyra, Syria. The recreation was based on photos from archaeologists and tourists taken before the site's destruction. After its initial translation into a VR experience, a replication was able to be carved into marble by robots programmed based on the digital model. However, with recreation, certain concerns must be addressed.

Ethical Considerations

It is important to note is that those who are recreating these works (often western and majority-white countries) must consider power structures and “how it’s different when Westerners or tech companies save cultural things compared to someone else who actually comes from the culture.” Sites and antiquities that are highly recognized within these countries, but perhaps not the greater Western culture, are subject to neglect in these projects. This is just one of several ethical considerations when using technologies to recreate cultural heritage sites. 

In Legal and Ethical Considerations for Digital Recreations of Cultural Heritage, Thompson highlights further considerations, including “the political uses of representation and interpretation of cultural heritage; the accessibility or lack thereof of digital representations; the violence to the ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ that the virtual reality might inflict; the correct approach to data transparency and sharing; and the ease both of manipulation and surreptitious capture of digital images.”

Concerns also often include political exploitation of the sites, such that these VR experiences will be built by engineers that have had little interaction or no real connection with the physical sites themselves, and that they will overall be modeled after Westernized perspectives. These heritage sites, as well as their antiquities, “are not protectable by copyright; at thousands of years old, they are in the public domain many times over,” which gives almost anyone that wants permission to form a recreation without the necessary thought to history, detail, and cultural consent. 

Concluding Thoughts

Virtual reality recreations, as an artistic response to cultural heritage destruction, serves as an important tool moving forward for many nations and their cultures. These recreations “stand as symbolic representations of a society’s existence and have paid the price over the eons,” as many of these projects have been created out of pure necessity of saving public memory of destructed sites.

While the creation of these VR experiences are at risk of numerous ethical considerations, including the perspective, political view, and accessibility, the correct intention and balanced collaboration can complete VR cultural heritage recreation projects that are relevant and non-exploitative. With the use of best practices, such as clearly marking VR experiences based on the original work and presenting it as a completely neutral representation, as well as providing annotations of conflicting theories or aspects of the representation that may differ to viewers. Allowing viewers to make their own informed decisions based on these annotations could certainly be a solution for the flaws in creations of these experiences, especially when presented by organizations that are not necessarily deeply connected to these heritage sites. With meaningful collaboration around the project, VR professionals and historians alike can build an experience that is adequately true and reflective of its home culture.