How to Breathe Life into Cultural Heritage 3D Reconstructions

Virtual 3D reconstructions of destroyed or disappeared cultural heritage enable viewers to effectively travel back through time and visualize monuments whose fragments they can see in museums or archaeological sites. A powerful way to convey information through three-dimensional geometry is to add interactive digital storytelling to virtual models. In this paper we present our work on interactive virtual cultural heritage applications with storytelling and show how users appreciate this presentation form, considering it as breathing life into 3D geometry. We describe the Tašlihan project, which consists of a documentary, interactive digital story and serious game about this valuable cultural monument from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, of which only one wall remains as a memento to its existence.