Blending two virtual realities: Using Google Glass to explore a virtual reality model of the Villa of Good Fortune at Olynthus

Abstract

In cultural heritage contexts, augmented reality offers the benefit of superimposing information or a recreation of a historical site or event on the view of the current site to add detail or bring it to life by restoring it to its original state or a selected time period. However, this still requires one to visit the site. An alternative to being there is a virtual reality recreation of the site that can be viewed via head mounted displays such as the Oculus Rift or life size display systems. However, what if one wants to clearly separate the past from the present or separate the information about the item from the item itself. In this study we have recreated a Virtual Reality model of a two-storey Greek Villa, the Villa of Good Fortune at Olynthus, which can be explored using Unity 5 Game technology. To enable the villa to be visited in a museum-like fashion, we provide information about the objects and villa through the additional use of Google Glass. As a result we have two layers of virtual reality: the virtual villa and the information about the villa in the Google Glass. We conducted a pilot to test the technology in use with novices and to look at the effectiveness of the Glass in helping users remember information it supplies compared to reading text on information cards in the virtual world. The pilot study found that 83% of participants preferred receiving the information via the Google Glass than in the virtual world, even though half of them found the information hard to read using the Glass. Further research is needed to determine whether either method improves cognitive function, memory recall or long-term understanding of the content.