Between the 13-14 November 2018, iMARECULTURE H2020 project participated in the Visual Heritage Expo 2018 in Vienna, Austria. Members of the HCI Lab of Masaryk University, gave a presentation entitled “Underwater Virtual Reality Excavation” and delivered a live demonstration and many participants tried it out. The demo presented an implementation of an immersive virtual environment for underwater archaeology in the form of a serious game. The main focus is on expanding the player’s knowledge, by teaching them about maritime archaeology and performing two archaeological procedures – tagging and dredging. The dredging procedure was accomplished by implementing and extending an existing voxel-based sand simulation approach and rasterizing it using the marching cubes algorithm on the GPU. The extension of the simulation consisted in adding a custom dredging simulation step that removes the sand from the grid. Also, an alternative approach for sand slippage using a custom heuristic exists. The game is developed for the HTC Vive head-mounted display and uses room-scale experience, allowing the user to move freely in the virtual environment. For more information about the scientific background of this work visit: https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/cg/2018/02/mcg2018020103-abs.html
