Virtual Museum, the Exploration of Cultural Heritage with Virtual Reality Techniques

The use of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) technology is a relatively recent trend that is spreading in various areas such as, for example, the digital fruition of cultural heritage. The set of appropriately integrated hardware and software technologies are able to combine three-dimensional models of virtual or real objects obtained, for example, from integrated laser scanner and/or photogrammetric survey. If the user observes a computer monitor there is three-dimensional non-immersive VR to which the user accesses through devices with which he can controls what is displayed onto a flat screen. In the VR a true reality can be simulated, you can navigate and move in real-time in photorealistic environs and interact with the objects presents in them. This paper illustrates the Virtual Museum project, a system of digital fruition of cultural heritage with low-cost virtual reality techniques, under development by AESEI s.r.l. - Spin-off of Polytechnic of Bari. This software, entirely written in C++ language, is compatible with the 64-bit Windows operating systems and interfaces with an Oculus DK2 Head Mounted Display (HMD) device for immersive vision and with the Leap Motion device for gestures recognition.