How virtual reality can draw us into history

Stefan Greuter on how virtual reality can draw us into history.

TEXT ON SCREEN: Stefan Greuter on how virtual reality can draw us into history.

AUDIO: Ambient music plays throughout.

VISUAL:  Stefan Greuter speaks to camera.

STEFAN GREUTER SPEAKS:  You can use VR as a tool for visualisation. You can show how things look like before you build them. You can get a pretty good impression of that. You can test it with people and then make changes very quickly. You can visualize it, certain concepts to people who may not understand technical drawings. We can also use it for other purposes.

It's called digital cultural heritage. We basically try to preserve cultural heritage sites and make sure not so many people go and visit them, but you can visit them in virtual reality, or you can get an idea of what something looks like before you actually go there, decide if you want to go there. Sometimes, we can see things in VR and visit places in VR that you actually can't even visit anymore because they've been destroyed or they are in areas where we don't have access to, and you can get an impression of what that's like.

The work we've done, for example, with Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shore about the Cave 220 at Dunhuang, really is something that provides you a glimpse into what this cave is like and how big it is, and where all these objects are, that are very difficult to gauge from any other kind of medium like photographs, and videos, even, don't give you that same kind of understanding that you get, like the way that you get it in the VR world.

VISUAL: Fades to RMIT logo, with white text on a black screen.

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