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Breaking the Glass: preserving social history in virtual environments.

This article was selected for publication in the special issue of International Journal of Arts and Technology – ‘Interactive Experiences in Multimedia and Augmented Environments’ after rigorous peer-review. It discusses the application of virtual reconstruction and interactive storytelling as research methodology and educational and presentation practices for cultural heritage sites. The major contribution of this research is in introducing and analysing a novel technology for exploration and discovery of spaces and artefacts that might not be readily available to view and interact with in reality. In this study, we attempted to bridge social history, narrative and virtual environments together, with a major goal of achieving the balance between technology, creativity and culture. We argue that the use of the interactive narrative format for digital heritage tours allows visitors to see different perspectives of social history that could help towards disintegrating the ‘voice of the authority’ of the museum display. We introduced the Narrating the Past project as a case study, in order to illustrate recent changes in the preservation of social history and guided tourist trails that aim to make the visitor’s experience more than just an architectural walk through. Our research brought together evidence from film and theatre studies, computer games and interactive storytelling, in order to investigate the narrative methods and devices needed to immerse the audience and hence to promote a greater sense of social engagement with the history.