Using Virtual Environments as a Visual Interface for Accessing Cultural Database Contents

Cultural institutions have to deal with an enormous amount of data, which are stored in cultural databases usually designed for and managed by professionals. Difficulties in accessing such databases usually preclude or limit their use for the general public. Moreover, in the historic, artistic and cultural areas, an important part of the information associated to an object is related to its original historical and spatial context, an evidence that is often not disclosed, or is difficult to explain, to the non experts. For this reason, it is important to try to re-contextualize – where possible – the elements of cultural collections in the places where these objects were in the past. To this end, in this work we propose the integration of databases and Virtual Reality technologies to develop novel visual interfaces to improve the accessibility, for the non experts, to the contents of cultural databases. Virtual Reality is used to re-create the contextual environment of the objects in the database, which can be explored to gain new insights on specific elements and to improve the awareness of relationships between them. The use of two different types of Virtual Environments has been investigated in the development of the proposed visual interfaces. Results of their evaluation by a user panel, in order to assess the accessibility and effectiveness of both interfaces in relation to each other and with a classic text-based interface, are also presented.