Virtual Archaeology in Second Life and OpenSimulator

Abstract

Traditional approaches to virtual archaeology include dealing with researching methods to capture information from heritage sites, creating models out of that information, and how to present them to the public; these historically needed intense technical procedures which might be too costly for some types of projects. Virtual worlds allowed new types of models of heritage sites to be produced and disseminated at a fraction of the cost. Second Life®, and its open source counterpart, OpenSimulator, are virtual world platforms with user-generated content. 3D models are created in real time and instantly rendered for all visitors. This allowed amateurs and researchers to create their own virtual archaeology projects easily and with few costs, and to have the resulting models immediately available to a vast community of millions of users. This article presents an overview of four different approaches to virtual archaeology projects that are present in Second Life and that have been...