Virtual Reality Application of the Fortress Al Zubarah in Qatar Including Performance Analysis of Real-Time Visualisation

Technological advancements in the area of Virtual Reality (VR) in the past years have the potential to fundamentally impact our everyday lives. VR makes it possible to explore a digital world with a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) in an immersive, embodied way. In combination with current tools for 3D documentation, modelling and software for creating interactive virtual worlds, VR has the means to play an important role in the conservation and visualisation of cultural heritage (CH) for museums, educational institutions and other cultural areas. Corresponding game engines offer tools for interactive 3D visualisation of CH objects, which makes a new form of knowledge transfer possible with the direct participation of users in the virtual world. However, to ensure smooth and optimal real-time visualisation of the data in the HMD, VR applications should run at 90 frames per second. This frame rate is dependent on several criteria including the amount of data or number of dynamic objects. In this contribution, the performance of a VR application has been investigated using different digital 3D models of the fortress Al Zubarah in Qatar with various resolutions. We demonstrate the influence on real-time performance by the amount of data and the hardware equipment and that developers of VR applications should find a compromise between the amount of data and the available computer hardware, to guarantee a smooth real-time visualisation with approx. 90 fps (frames per second). Therefore, CAD models offer a better performance for real-time VR visualisation than meshed models due to the significant reduced data volume.