Augmented, mixed and virtual reality. Techniques of visualization and presentation of archaeological heritage (original) (raw)

Introduction In the year 1994 Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino defi ned Virtual Reality (VR) as opposite to Real Environment and, between these both extremes, introduced the whole world of diff erent types of realities that they called Mixed (Milgram, Kishino 1994). Twenty years later, it is interesting to observe how this vocabulary is used nowadays to defi ne virtual environments and how they evolved with the development of digital technologies. Many people do not know that the concept of Virtual Reality is closely linked to digital technologies and that, by defi nition, it only can exist in the computer, and that it is possible to say that we experience it in real time, with the use of screens and VR accessories (gloves, cloth, etc.). The tourism or leisure fi eld is unlike other fi elds where the " virtual " concept is widely applied, such as in medicine, commerce or education, in which there is a clear diff erence between the use of VR or AR. In the tourism or leisure fi eld, when we talk about " the realities " related to cultural tourism products, we fi nd a couple of aspects on which we propose a refl ection. Firstly, we fi nd the concepts of Virtual, Augmented or Mixed Reality to be used erroneously or in a confusing way with reference to the description of touristic-cultural products such as visits. Second, the vocabulary used in marketing campaigns and cultural dissemination strategies, often off er virtual visits when, in fact, it is a series of photographs or 360-degree video recordings of exhibition spaces and halls or archaeological sites. To avoid these confusions, we propose a conceptual review of diff erent types of existing realities and structure them with the use of a table. This format allows the technical process of designing of tourist-cultural products to be shown by starting with the realities and their dimensions, then passing through the type of images, the visualization techniques and fi nally archiving a certain cultural tourism product.