A Compelling Virtual Tour of the Dunhuang Cave With an Immersive Head-Mounted Display

The Dunhuang Caves are the home to the largest Buddhist art sites in the world and are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Over time, the murals have been damaged by both humans and nature. In this article, we present an immersive virtual reality system for exploring spatial cultural heritage, which utilizes the digitized data from the Dunhuang Research Academy to represent the virtual environment of the cave. In this system, the interaction techniques that allow users to flexibly experience any of the artifacts or displays contribute to their understanding of the cultural heritage. Additionally, we evaluated the system by conducting a user study to examine the extent of user acquaintance after the entire experience. Our result has shown what participants learn from the spatial context and augmented information in the VR. This can be used as design considerations for developing other spatial heritages.