Digital Tours and 3D Modelling: White Paper

by Kevin Naicker | Aug 1, 2024 | Consultant Blog

Abstract

The increasing adoption of digital forms of engagement in the heritage industry has been in large part a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, which motivated heritage businesses, sites and organisations to reflect on and
innovate with their digital offerings. Though a significant amount of time has passed and heritage places have widely reopened, heritage sites and businesses are continuing to experiment and expand on their digital
packages.

Within these digital packages the digital tour is a highly popular means of engagement, allowing people to visit a version of a heritage site or place from anywhere. This has become an important development for accessibility in the industry, allowing new types of tourism not restricted by location, economic status or disability. Digital tours result in new ways of crafting unique learning experiences that can enhance the in-person experience or create a wholly new experience.

This whitepaper looks to assess the scope of how digital tours are used in the heritage industry, both online and in-person, understanding the design decisions that go into crafting digital tours and how these tours
increase engagement while also effectively communicating knowledge. It interrogates fundamental aspects and commonalities between tours, identifies trends and looks at how we might innovate with digital tours
further.

This whitepaper will also consider the exciting developments of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), assessing how these technologies might impact the future of digital tourism. It will argue the case for gamification as a means of making engaging digital tours, as well as looking at how video games can be a strong inspiration for developing better tours. Finally this whitepaper will assess the costs associated with digital tour design and how best to make the most of funding.

Digital Tours and 3D Modelling

When thinking about digital tours we should also think about digital modelling. The tourist exploring a digital space or digital collection is not looking at real sites or places, but rather a digital recreation of them. Real in-person visits to a place are mediated through the human body and perspective but this is not necessarily the case for a digital experience.

The nature of digital technology allows greater control of the overall experience, allowing a wide scope for what a digital tour can be. Lots of design decisions go into making a digital tour but design components which are key to dictating how a digital tour is experienced are:

• The perspective the tourist has as they are doing the tour.
• Movement and how the tourist navigates through the tour.
• The relaying and flow of information.

Understanding these three core aspects is critical to thinking about how a digital tour can be crafted. There can be a high amount of variation within the expression of these three cores, although there are common design trends and decisions which can be identified. Alongside thinking about these cores and design trends, practitioners also need to generate a strong understanding of why people pursue digital experiences, how their interest is maintained and the purpose of what a particular tour is attempting to achieve.

Perspective

Perspective is highly important in how a digital tour is structured and experienced. Digital perspective refers to how the user views the world of the digital tour. Perspective is one of the first design decisions to be made that will be highly influential on the outcome of a tour project. This can materialise as such:

• First-Person: Many tours take a first-person perspective, letting the tourist experience the tour as they would see the tour normally through their own eyes. This mimicking of a real human experience can help make the tour highly immersive and generate some of the feeling of exploring the actual location
• Aerial View: This is a top-down view of the model where the whole of the model or large parts of it will be visible at any time during the tour. This is reminiscent of looking down at a map.
• First-Person, Aerial Hybrid: Many tours will use both a first-person and aerial perspective, with the tourist being able to move between the two perspectives. Tour designers can place a restricted first-person view to specific areas of interest. So while they might be able to see all of the model when they wish, they might only see an immersive scene occasionally and only when it aids the experience.
• Third Person: The tourist is laced within the model but is looking at a modelled avatar. This view is common in video games and has been done in Assassin’s Creed and the associated Assassin’s Creed Discovery Tours. This approach allows for new options in navigation within the world of the tour, for example parkour and climbing are significant components of the Assassin’s Creed series mechanics.

Navigation

Navigation is highly important because how the tourist moves through a virtual space and how clearly they can orient themselves within it contributes strongly to the more abstract ‘feel’ and ‘flow’ of the tour. Smooth movement and good navigational aids can be the difference between a tour that feels frustrating and one that can be revisited. This can be generated in a number of different ways:

• Click-and-go: A common structure for digital navigation in tours is through a ’click-and-go’ approach. Movement around the environment is similar to Google Street View, where you click on particular fixed points to travel to. You can look around you in a particular point but there’s no free movement and no in-between the different points. This can work in any perspective.
• Video Tours: A video tour of a site made by someone exploring it and filming their exploring. This approach allows for effective, specially crafted tours that are highly efficient to produce because video is easier to put together than 3D models. The ease of making a video tour also makes it a method that a wider group of stakeholders can engage in, allowing for more community-centred tour-making.
• Gamification and Free-form travelling: One approach which has been less common so far with digital tours is to make them gamified and give the tourist control of navigation in the world of a tour like they would have in the world of a video game like the Legend of Zelda series or those in the Walking Simulator genre of games. This could open up new possibilities for thinking about environment design, alternate forms of movement as well as making navigation a fun experience in itself. This grants full control but will require careful planning and development of mechanics for navigating the 3D environment.

Flow of Information

The primary purposes of a digital heritage tour are to immerse a digital visitor in a historical setting and to communicate history and historical ideas. Tour creators need to strike a balance where the user learns what you wish to communicate without flooding them with information and taking them out of the experience.

Striking this balance requires a strong conceptualisation for how the tour communicates information, as well as how that information is structured into digestible pieces. Any understanding of the flow of information also needs to understand the method by which information is obtained.

The most common form of disclosing information is the use of information markers. Information markers are scattered around a tour and work in the following ways:

• As the tourist explores they find markers that when clicked can reveal information such as boxes of text, photographs or videos.
• A marker can be attached to a particular feature in the model and present text relevant to that particular feature. For example clicking on a portrait marker will open a text box that might tell about the history of the person in the portrait.
• These markers only give information about particular aspects of the story/history being told in the tour. This breaks up how information is found so that the tourist is never overwhelmed, allows them to skip information they’re less interested in and helps the tourist draw physical and spatial connections to pieces of information. This all helps with how the tourist will encounter, process and retain information.

This is the most popular method of communicating information and is so for a reason. Markers prove so effective because they are simply implemented and because they help designers structure information naturally by thinking about which information should be attached to a particular marker.

Markers, however, have two issues. The first is they are widely used and so they lose their impact if users interact with multiple marker-based tours. The second is that they are not particularly interactive. The user clicks on a marker and they get a box of text to read. As the practice develops and as tour designers experiment with the medium, there will be a requirement to experiment with other means of communicating information. Potential ways of achieving this could be:

• Handling and object interaction: The tourist can find objects in the space that take the place of markers, such as a coin or piece of pottery. Objects can be picked up and handled digitally so the tourist can have a more immersive experience with a particular object.
• Letters: Similar to a textbook but one that can be used for a more narrative-driven experience where the tourist can read text that is stylised to be from a historic situation.
• Activities: Learning through action by literally doing the actions which a piece of information might talk about. For example in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the player can take part in flyting, a poetic exchange of insults between two parties, like a rap battle, that Medieval Scandinavians took part in. Rather than just watching a flyting competition, the player can take part in it themselves through the character, picking different dialogue options that affect whether they win their flyting competition. They actively participate to make the history that they would otherwise be told about.

VR and AR Immersion

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are increasingly exciting innovations for changing the state of how the heritage industry and heritage organisations engage their audiences. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality offer new possibilities for creating immersion and interactivity that can enhance the digital experience and help it stick in the memory of the tourist. Though the two technologies VR and AR are often grouped together there are important differences between them which can deeply affect the kind of experience they produce:

Virtual Reality:

• Simulates another reality, completely separate from our normal reality.
• Requires a specially-designed headset to create the experience. To generate the immersive experience VR requires a person’s eyes to be completely covered. As such a lot of extra facilities and allowances need to be made to accommodate VR.
• Does not require a digital tourist to travel in-person to the site they are visiting in the digital VR tour.

Augmented Reality:

• Rather than creating a separate reality, AR creates an interaction between the digital world and reality.
• Works by transposing images, text or video directly onto real spaces. The implication of this for heritage and historic sites is that this can alter real heritage sites or transpose the model of a site onto a completely different location.
• AR can be generated on a specially-designed headset but can be realised on other pieces of hardware, such as a smartphone or a gaming console.
• The AR experience can be achieved from any kind of space depending on how it is designed. AR can also alter the in-person experience when visiting a historic site, as well as substituting for it.

Both technologies are still developing and there are still many factors to consider for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to be an effective means of digital heritage outreach. On a broader level, issues of headset clunkiness, motion sickness and accessibility of the hardware are also highly impactful to how these technologies will be used in the medium.

Applying them effectively in heritage will require a period of experimentation, theory-crafting and risk, but heritage practitioners who do experiment and pioneer their implementation can be rewarded with experience in crafting unique and exciting digital experiences in a completely different dimension.

Gamification

Gamification and thinking about gamification can be a potential avenue for experimentation and development of digital tours as a craft. Gamification refers to the act of making a digital experience feel like a game with more interactive elements and a greater emphasis on the agency of the person engaging with an experience.

Gamification does require a large investment in time, money and labour, which is a significant roadblock to designing in this way. Heritage businesses function on a tighter pool of resources than a games studio while the talent and experience for creating this kind of experience is currently lacking. A digital tour is also only part of a heritage business’ offering, where a game studio is primarily concerned with producing a game.

Given the potential costs in time, money and labour it is not always possible to dedicate available resources towards a comprehensive gamification design philosophy. A stronger understanding of game design principles among tour designers can help them think differently about their conceptualisation of digital tours, however, as well as whether more stripped back versions of gamified mechanics are possible.

Finding this inspiration requires looking at a wide source of games and building a strong understanding of different principles of game design. Principles which this paper believes could be highly relevant to the design of digital tours are:

• Movement: How the player character moves throughout the world is highly impactful to how they experience it. The type of movement is important, such as whether the character walks, swims, flies etc… It’s also important to think about the smaller features of that movement. For example when walking we can think about walking speed, how quickly the character can change direction or the sound of footsteps.
• Exploration: How the player explores the game environment is highly important and is dictated by the design of that environment. For example players can be allowed to explore small standalone levels where they follow a linear path or a large game world with sprawling biomes and environments that are interconnected. Exploration is also about what there is to find within that space.
• Rewards: Rewards incentive continued play and give the players reasons to engage with game designs. For example exploring may see the player find a piece of treasure or a letter containing ‘lore’ about the game. The game systems can also be rewards in themselves. Examples of this are a fun movement system like parkour, or the reward for exploration being the discovery of a new explorable location in the world.
• Staging and Environmental Storytelling: This refers to how developers build an environment, drop design features into the environment that allude to a larger narrative, as well as how the developers guides the player through that environment so they experience it in a particular way. Most games have some form of linear design where the player is guided along particular routes where they might be guided to a new story event or an impressive vista.
• Puzzles: Puzzles are a game mechanic that could be an interesting addition to digital tours. Solving puzzles requires a deep engagement with a game space, its logic and the information the game tells the player. They also provide a sense of challenge and reward for completion that can incentivise learning and create a satisfying payoff for doing so.

Examples of these design decisions can be seen in many games. For digital tours a game like the most recent iterations of Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider use all of these principles and are an interesting case study because they do so within the aesthetic of historical and archaeological-inspired environments.

On the smaller scale of gamification, we could use walking simulators as a benchmark for how gamified features can be achieved on a smaller budget and time cost. Walking simulators employ many stripped-back mechanics, for example by crafting smaller environments or restricting the mechanics to the simplistic walking motion that inspires the genre. Walking simulator games which could be studied include The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Firewatch.