Chronology and Geospace Design in Virtual Reality for Archaeological Data Exhibition

The digital information that is collected during an archaeological investigation concerns all of its phases: the recording of the excavation process, the archaeological and the archaeometric analyses of the stratigraphic units and the findings, the interpretation of the results and their dissemination. All the digital materials can be displayed for a wide audience in a museum context as well as support further investigations by the researchers. This is especially applicable for 3D surveys of excavations (trenches and site surroundings) and the findings, which require some suitable applications for their display. Though there exist many digital archaeological projects and archaeological data abound in repositories, each display is a unique endeavor. This paper describes the VR system developed for the BeArchaeo project. It specifically addresses the design metaphor, based on chronology and geospace, two major dimensions in archaeology. The novelty of the system is its ability to exploit such dimensions in order to support ongoing archaeological projects, providing access to both researchers and the general public. The goal of the digitally born BeArchaeo project is a thorough archaeological and archaeometric investigation of the Kofun period in Japan, also including materials related to adjacent chronological periods. The VR system described here, called BeA-ViR, is a virtual exhibition of the ongoing project findings, deployed for both a screen-gamepad installation as well as a CAVE platform, with abstract and physical structures that concur to provide access to heterogenous materials. It also includes the realization of a central informative infrastructure that relies on a semantic database for the metadata description.