The Virtual Museum: Virtualisation of Real Historical Environments and Artefacts and Three-dimensional Shape-based Searching

An intuitive technique for managing three-dimensional objects by shape is presented. This technique is applied to the Virtual Museum in the framework of heritage applications. The Virtual Museum is a virtual reality-based museum that allows the public to visualise, compare, manipulate and search the collection with an intuitive query by shape paradigm. The artefacts and the museum are virtualised with laser scanners and photogrammetric techniques. A high degree of realism can be attained by those techniques and the context in which the artefacts were discovered or were used can be recreated.