Virtual Reality in Media and Technology : Digitization of Cultural Artifacts and Industrial Production Processes

Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies have by now become established in numerous engineering areas of application. Also in the cultural and media fields interactive three-dimensional content is being increasingly made available for information purposes, and used in scientific research. On the one hand, this development is accelerated by current advances in smartphones, tablets and head-mounted displays. These support complex 3D applications in mobile application scenarios, and enable us to capture our real physical environment using multimodal sensors in order to correlate it with the digital 3D world. On the other hand, new automated digitization technologies such as CultLab3D of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD allow the production of the necessary digital replicas of real objects, quickly, economically and of high quality.