I gave a keynote Monday 9 December at Dhdownunder 2019, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia. The title was Digital Heritage: Presenting Futures Past

The slides can be viewed and downloaded in the nzerik directory at slideshare.

MAIN POINTS

1. Digital heritage, Virtual Heritage, Extended Reality (XR): what are they?
2. Can gaming, AR or MR provide insight to the past?
3. OR: Are they a waste of money, expensive new technology?
4. Could, for example, digital heritage pose a threat to culture?
5. Ziauddin Sardar 1995: “Cyberspace is a giant step forward towards museumization of the world: where anything remotely different from Western culture will exist only in digital form.”
6. Digital Heritage highlights and challenges (interactive + immersive examples).

To cut over 80 slides short, my answers to the initial questions are

1. VR: “reality”: untapped potential, save the IxD!! (We should preserve and disseminate the interaction design and experience, academic papers are not the answer here).
2. Gaming, AR, MR provides insight to the past-but learning more from designing.
3. High-technology gets in the way.
4. Digital Heritage poses a threat to culture, if we don’t clearly consider “culture”.
5.  Sardar: Cyberspace a symptom not a cause, museumization a partially necessary evil, Western culture is a vague target.
6. Digital Heritage communicates, seldom preserves, more end-user involvement required.

I suggest future research and potential solutions are

• Flexible formats, agreed standards, sensory interfaces
• New mechanics, cultural significance and care
• Levels of resolution, access layers
• 3D infrastructure links to data, research, community, XR
• Encourage creative re-use by end-users