Exploring Fragmented data: Environments, People, and the Senses in Virtual Reality

Taking into consideration that archaeologists and historians are today more frequently encouraged to think in terms of digital transduction of historical materials, this chapter focuses on the potentials and pitfalls of ‘visualizing’ ‘recreating’ and ‘re-enacting/experiencing the senses’ in Virtual Reality (thereon VR) environments. More precisely, we focus on the very idea of sensory immersion for archaeological enquiry, research, study and dissemination. This chapter draws upon four VR projects at Humlab, Umeå University. The first is an example of using archaeological data for supporting the interpretation process in a Mesolithic site, environment from GIS to an immersive platform. The second is a result of collaborative work with the project ancient dance modern dancers (Slaney et al. 2018) in capturing the intangible art of Roman Pantomime in the theatre of Pompeii on Virtual Reality. The third is the implementation of interactive tools for an immersive study of photogrammetric models of medieval rock-cut settlements while the fourth is an assessment of the implementation of VR Google Earth in teaching ancient topography for undergraduate archaeology students. We show how important and interesting research is made in the process of tool experimentation and tool development.