Risk management of architectural heritage in virtual reality

Abstract

The risk management of architectural heritage is particularly important because it is highly exposed to natural and artificial disasters. This study proposes the virtual reality (VR)-based risk management for architectural heritage. To reduce the time and effort required to manage architectural heritage risks, we develop unique metadata structure and attributes for a risk management framework. First, a new type of the 5W1H (what, when, where, why, and how) metadata is applied to our model to deal with specific challenges in managing architectural heritage. Second, the metadata structure is proposed which contains Point of Interest (POI)-anchor-content elements for visualization of content in VR. Third, we propose a linker metadata that can be used to establish connections between POIs and to load external data for a specific context. Due to the above characteristics, we can propose a risk management framework that is suitable for integrating a variety of risk management and historical information across different sources and formats using historic building information modeling (HBIM), this framework will provide accurate and relevant information specifically targeted toward site managers and maintenance technicians working at remote sites. As part of this research, we derived system and design requirements, and then we created VR-based applications, and tested their effectiveness on site managers working at heritage sites and maintenance technicians working at remote sites. The results of focus group interviews and user surveys demonstrate that, compared to the existing paper-based method, our VR-based risk management application significantly reduced time and effort for the users to preserve and protect architectural heritage. Finally, we could further improve the effectiveness of the application for maintenance technicians at remote site by including a content filtering function, which was pointed out by most of the interviewees. We verified this improvement using heuristic evaluation and focus group interview.