[ISEA2018] Paper: Sujan Shrestha — Sustaining Cultural Heritage through Digital Preservation

Abstract

Keywords: Cultural Heritage, Digital Preservation, Virtual Reality, 3D Visualization, Prototyping, Human-Computer Interaction

We are on the brink of losing many cultural heritage sites around the world. Man-made and natural disasters have played a contributing role in these destructions. Museums, libraries, archives and other private and public institutions across the world have undertaken the tasks of preservation and conservation. The preservation progress is tremendous but also limited. The
preservation of cultural heritage requires extensive collaboration within the community in defining accuracy and authenticity of historical information. It needs establishing cultural knowledge, what it entails, and how the community might best contribute. It demands scholars
to establish preservation practices that are deeply ingrained in the cultural activities. This paper is an attempt to use the traditional and emerging technologies in digital preservation of a cultural heritage site in the Kathmandu, Nepal which was destroyed in the April 2015 earthquake. Working with a local community in Nepal, overcoming preservation challenges and visualizing of three-dimensional prototypes in a virtual reality environment, this paper explores in bridging the gap between the documentation and preservation practices.

Full text p. 49-53