Virtual tourism – Digital scanning, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality as a Holistic Approach to Chinese Historic Building Preservation

摘要

There are many historical buildings spread around the rural areas of China and very few of them have been documented through digital media. In the face of massive Chinese urbanization, many of these cultural relics are facing the risk of damage, collapse, and even disappearance. The undocumented disappearance of these monuments would be a great loss for Chinese traditional culture and therefore this thesis proposes to solve this preservation problem using a combination of digital media platforms including 3D digital reconstruction, virtual reality, and augmented reality to digitally document and present these monuments. This thesis introduces these three technologies individually by presenting case studies for each to illustrate in greater depth the value each technology brings into the realm of heritage conservation. In the final section of this thesis, a mixed reality educational mobile application is presented as a test of this integrated technology solution to explore the potential of implementing this solution on a massive scale.