The GortinaVR project. A virtual reality for the dissemination of digital archaeological content in university online courses

Nowadays, the use of Virtual Reality technologies is increasing and enabling new opportunities to explore virtual worlds. With different aims and scopes, similar technologies are already involved in the development of immersive systems and virtual reconstructions of archeological sites. The paper illustrates a state-of-the-art virtual reality-based application adopted in the context of higher education and describes in detail our experience in developing such a technology, in the ecosystem of the University of Rome Unitelma Sapienza, where courses are accessible online and where students of Classical Archaeology can experience immersive and interactive contents. We focus on those novel features, of our prototype platform, devoted to the design and development of cross-devices immersive experiences. In fact, our system offers multiple interchangeable multimodal modalities of interaction, and enables students to consume digital archaeological contents by using both immersive and non-immersive virtual reality devices, i.e. phone-based VR helmets or common point and click tools