Abstract Documenting reproducible workflows is a recognized gap in Digital Humanities scholarship, particularly for sacred heritage digitization where tacit methodological decisions around ethics, capture, authoring, and evaluation are rarely made explicit. This paper addresses that gap through a fully documented, pipeline for creating and assessing 360° virtual tours of Kerala temple murals, demonstrated through the Chemmanthatta Mahadeva Temple, Thrissur, central Kerala. What distinguishes this workflow from comparable digital heritage projects is the intersection of three methodological commitments rarely combined in a single pipeline: (1) ethically governed capture of a living, ritually active sacred site; (2) darśan-sensitive authoring that preserves the spatial and devotional logic of the temple interior; and (3) an embedded audience evaluation instrument designed to measure culturally specific perceptions of aura, sacredness, and authenticity in a virtual environment. Together, these commitments surface the “hidden costs” of sacred heritage digitization that standard workflows leave unaddressed. The workflow comprises five documented stages. In the first stage, Ethical Capture, permission had to be obtained from both local temple administration and Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Thrissur Circle. ASI regulations mandated certain requirements regarding the placement of cameras, use of flash photography, and entry into the sanctum sanctorum itself, all of which were respected and included in the workflow process; specifically, the ritual lines of sight involving the deepasthambham and balipeetham were retained in the panoramic views. Community approval protocols were used to allow for publishing of devotional images and minimize participant responses. In the second stage, Contextual Authoring, panoramas of 360° views were edited in Affinity Photo 2 and imported into Articulate Storyline 360, chosen because of its hotspot navigation tools and minimal coding required for humanities scholars. The final product will offer annotations about mural iconography but maintain the temple experience from entry to sanctum. If a team does not have access to Articulate Storyline 360, the pipeline was designed with enough detail to recreate using open-source software options such as Pannellum or A-Frame. Thirdly, evaluation design incorporates the implementation of a purpose-designed survey embedded directly into the tour. The measurement tool includes ten items measuring on a Likert scale three constructs: aura/presence, sacredness/reverence, and authenticity/fidelity, along with two additional items for comparing physical and virtual darśan. Aura is defined and operationalized based on the ritualized embeddedness approach suggested by Benjamin, elaborated by Kenderdine and Yip in terms of digital facsimile; sacredness is based on the definition of darśan as a relational experience with a divine image by Eck; and authenticity is understood and measured from both material (accuracy of reproduction) and experiential (genuineness of experience) perspectives. The definitions have been developed specifically to consider cross-cultural differences in perceptions, as some respondents are likely to perceive the above-mentioned constructs from the perspective of people unfamiliar with Kerala temple culture. The fourth stage was the deployment and data collection process where the tour had been hosted on the web. Data have been collected using n=100 individuals who came from a diverse community made up of professionals in heritage, art history students, and general public. The backgrounds of the participants were captured as covariates to test the effect that previous knowledge of darśan has on perceived virtual sacredness. This could minimize novelty bias by acclimating the participant to the 360° interface before evaluation questions were asked. Analysis and Archiving: The fifth phase involved exporting descriptive statistics in CSV format and coding the qualitative answers manually. Analysis so far reveals that respondents with experience with temple worship felt higher levels of sacredness and presence but authenticity was relatively consistent, implying that visual realism is more universal compared to the experience of worshiping. All assets used in this project are version-controlled at GitHub under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, including panoramas, 360 Storyline template with its branching, survey form as an independent Google Form, raw data schema. Portability is an essential consideration in the workflow design. The five-step process can be generalized from this particular temple; any team engaging with a heritage site that requires institutional clearance, spatial reasoning, and culturally sensitive appraisal can leverage this model. Chemmanthatta temple is only a concrete example of the more generalizable process rather than a special case. Through articulation of the ASI negotiating protocols, darśan-oriented UX design principles, and consent-based approaches inherent in similar projects but usually unspoken of, we aim at developing an ethically sustainable virtual heritage system consistent with DARIAH's approach.
Suresh et al. (2026) studied this question.