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Source publication
The archaeological site of the Domus Romana in Rabat, Malta was excavated almost 100 years ago yielding artefacts from the various phases of the site. The Melite Civitas Romana project was designed to investigate the domus, which may have been the home of a Roman Senator, and its many phases of use. Pending planned archaeological excavations design...
Citations
... Alternatively, virtualizing the service offering increased the attractiveness of museums and cultural institutions to national and international audiences. Recontextualizing the visiting experience in the cyber-physical landscape is consistent with adopting an open perspective in the configuration of the service exchange with the audience (Tanasi et al., 2021). Virtualization modernizes the relationship with the visitors (Camps-Ortueta et al., 2021), activating new ways of interacting with the audience and pushing forward organizational attractiveness (Massari et al., 2022). ...
Purpose
The evolving visitors' expectations and the unfolding digital transformation compel rethinking on the service offering of museums and cultural institutions. Although digitalization and people-centeredness are widely exploited to enhance the visiting experience, there is limited evidence of their implications on organizational attractiveness. The article investigates this issue, examining the service attributes that entice visitors.
Design/methodology/approach
The study collected secondary data from the latest census study by the Italian Institute of Statistics on museums and cultural institutions. Two hierarchical regression models have been run on a sample of large publicly owned organizations ( n = 312) to identify the service factors that were most effective in attracting Italian and foreign visitors.
Findings
Museums and cultural institutions undergoing a digital transformation were more effective in attracting visitors. The delivery of virtual tours and online events captivated the Italian audience. Foreigners appreciated the opportunity to use applications augmenting the on-site visit.
Practical implications
Digitalization and people-centeredness improve the attractiveness of museums and cultural institutions. Using digital channels to engage visitors fosters their desire to interact with cultural heritage. Furthermore, digitalization enriches the on-site visit, expanding conventional services with virtuality. However, the adverse effects on cultural heritage should be carefully handled.
Originality/value
This study highlights the service attributes that add to the attractiveness of museums and cultural institutions, enabling them to engage visitors and improve the visiting experience.
... As such, Building by the River will use 3D assets generated from the 3D digitization of artifacts and building materials captured using digital photogrammetry, structured light scanning, and 3D laser scanning as well as the TLS data that makes up the game map. This combination of materials is seem in other academic works for their initial uses (Bentkowska-Kafel et al. 2018;Tanasi et al. 2018bTanasi et al. , 2021b. Building by the River intends to use a combination of all types of 3D digitized data in the game assets. ...
With 10 million copies sold and 500 million dollars of revenue, the 11th installment of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018), showed how a videogame based on ancient Greek history and archaeology can make a splash in popular culture and that the distant past can become an extinguishable source of infinite engaging gaming narratives. As pedagogic and research counterparts to videogames of this kind, serious games and archaeogames focusing on Greek and Roman civilizations move from different premises, though aspiring to the same level of success. Serious games, created for a primary purpose other than sole entertainment, have found their way into classrooms and museums to educate students in a variety of disciplines mostly relying on digital storytelling strategies. Archaeogaming, on the other hand, encompasses, among other things, the creation of video games by archaeologists, who create 3D representations of the ancient material culture subject of their study, initially for the purpose of testing hypotheses in simulated environment and later to popularize archaeology and cultural heritage studies, finding a more ‘serious’ use in higher education.
This dissertation deals with defining best practices in archaeogaming design and production focusing on two practical examples of re-use of digital archaeological data for the generation of game assets for teaching and public outreach. Both case studies explore the context of Late Roman Sicily on which I conducted most of the experimental work in the preparatory years of this research. The first case study will be the narrative game prototype for the Villa del Casale (Piazza Armerina) in Enna, Sicily, entitled In Ersilia’s Footsteps, featuring Ersilia Caetani-Lovatelli (1840-1925), the first female archaeologist in Italian history. The game, developed in collaboration with the University of Arkansas’ Tesseract and directed by Dr. David Fredrick and Dr. Rhodora Vennarucci, narrative follows her in the exploration of the Late Roman Imperial countryside residence and UNESCO World Heritage site. The game revolves around the use of 3D digitized assets, created employing digital photogrammetry and 3D laser-scanning to capture the archaeological site, that significantly contributed to increase the realism of the game environment influencing the game creation process towards telling stories of real historic characters in real historic places. The second game, Building by the River, is an a building and experimental archaeogame, aimed at both contextualized elements from the archaeological site as well as the ability aid researchers in understanding the relationship between space and flow in the Late Roman villa of Caddeddi on the Tellaro river (Noto). More specifically, it seeks to explore how the Villa di Caddeddi may have looked and how the rooms functioned during its time as an operating rural villa in the late 4th Century CE. Giving players the ability to pick from a list of 3D digitized assets of actual archaeological materials found both on site and in similar Sicilian Roman villas, the game seeks to engage with playful building and experimentation as seen in other popular digital game titles, like Sims 4, Subnautica, and Minecraft. The on-going work at adding assets to use in the game as well as learn more about the nature and history of the Villa di Caddeddi is discussed in terms of the second-life of digital data, archaeological interpretation, and investigation of spatial use by ancient Romans in their elite rural homes. These assets, in both In Ersilia’s Footsteps and Building by the River, represent at the same time an example in best practices in reusing 3D data, since, once used to achieve research goals, they are repurposed and in combination with an original narrative and a user-friendly interface and mechanics they become the core of an engaging and exciting exploration game.
Ultimately, the experimental work, the new data gathered and the production of two original media research tools have proven to be a strategic decision to advance the digital scholarship agenda on Roman archaeology of Sicily and to trace a path for incorporating archaeogaming as a methodological approach into a research framework. The ability to re-use scientific data for the purpose of public outreach, education, and research allows for archaeologists to address pseudoscience and dangerous representations of the field. As such, the need to provide assets for games can be served through the second life of 3D digital archaeological materials.
... Other technologies allow the creation of virtual tours of existing museums, such as photogrammetry [10], 3D scanning [11], or the use of 360-degree cameras that add a multitude of points of view [12,13]. ...
Museums have been the main centers for the dissemination of cultural heritage throughout history. In recent years, they have been increasingly digitizing their content, so that it is now common for each museum to have free digital content available on the Web. This can be photographs of the works with detailed information or even objects created in three dimensions. It is also common to find virtual museums, which might be a representation of an existing museum that has been digitized or a museum created only in digital format. This paper describes the creation of a virtual museum of Spanish clothing from the 16th century, one that exists only in digital format, accessible from a computer or digital tablet. In order to create the museum, various documentation and drawings or pictures of the clothing of that time were studied. The costumes were then created in a specialized 3D costume-modeling program called Marvelous Designer. A 3D model of the exhibition hall was created in Blender, and finally, everything was assembled in the Unity videogame engine, where the interactive part was also added, allowing the virtual visitors to walk through the hall as if they were visiting a real museum.
... The digitization of cultural heritage is becoming more critical, including intangible heritage [39], historical sites [40], archaeological sites [41]. We here developed and described a cultural heritage tourism subsystem, which applies a variety of technologies and methods (such as computer technology, IoT, photogrammetry, geographic information technology, VR technology, and environment assessment methods). ...
The joint development of cultural heritage protection and tourism is an essential part of sustainable heritage tourism. Mount Lushan in China is such a site which in the past has had shortcomings in heritage protection and heritage tourism marketing. The present research addresses this issue by using digital technologies such as oblique aerial photography, 3D laser scanning technology, and 360 degrees panorama technology to digitize the Mount Lushan cultural landscape heritage site, integrating all elements to create a virtual tourism subsystem. It provides users with a virtual experience of cultural landscape heritage tourism and promotes cultural landscape tourism marketing. In addition, tourist flow and environmental subsystems were built through the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and analytical models. The tourist flow subsystem can help managers to regulate tourist flow according to the tourist carrying capacity threshold. Managers can also conduct environmental health assessment and management through the "pressure-state-response" model provided by the environmental subsystem. Finally, a comprehensive platform was developed based on the system concept, which integrated the three subsystems and their functions, and developed different versions to provide a visual platform for tourists and managers. This study provides a new model for the joint development of cultural heritage protection and tourism activities.
The Roman Domus in Mdina, Malta, has become an idealised example of the Roman presence in the Maltese Islands; the partial remains of a lavishly decorated domus that would have in its time been situated within the walls of the urbanised Roman city of Melite. The site, last excavated more than 100 years ago, is also home to the only museum in the Maltese Islands, which is solely dedicated to house and showcase a collection of artefacts that date from the Roman period in Maltese history. This site alone provides a unique perspective on Roman Malta, being our only substantial remnant from the Roman Maltese capital, and needs a refocused and renewed exploration. For a long time, the archaeology of Roman sites in Malta has suffered a distinct lack of priority, and it has only been in the last two decades that considerably more focus has been placed on understanding the Roman period. Most of the archaeological focus, in this respect, has centred on agricultural villas, and though this study has illuminated a better understanding of the Roman period, very little has been undertaken in the last century in piecing together the importance of urban Melite to the broader nature of life in the islands, as well as their place in the larger context of the central Roman Mediterranean. The Melite Civitas Romana Project offers the potential of new understanding of the domus and the surrounding archaeological environment through a modern exploration of the site and the promise of the first available assemblage of Roman material from an urban Roman context.
