@phdthesis{komianos2017thesis,
	abstract = {The need for Cultural Heritage communication has lead to solutions that take advantage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and even of more specific ICTs domains among which are the Virtual Environments, the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.
	Continuous accumulation of cultural heritage information and the access of a diversified audience of increasingly size sets challenges that were not produced or could not be faced by conventional channels of Cultural Heritage communication as museums, collections and libraries. In the present thesis the abundance of Cultural Heritage information and the particularities of its audience are considered to be a topic of research focusing on the information personalization in Cultural Heritage Environments. Special attention is given on Virtual Environments due to the fact that they provide flexibility and adaptation to their users requirements and respective solutions are proposed. Approaches applying these solutions on real environments and mixed environments resulting by Augmented Reality applications are also studied.
	The concepts of Virtual Environments, Virtual and Augmented Reality and their applications on Cultural Heritage communication are discussed in order to enhance the subject's better understanding. Furthermore, a review of latest research work related to: (i) the forms of Cultural Heritage Virtual Environments; (ii) up to date implementation aspects; (iii) the technologies, implementation methodologies and their challenges; (iv) the aspects of user's-visitor's interaction with the representation space (virtual, real or mixed); (v) the communication approaches of the represented Cultural Heritage and their categorization based on their purpose; (vi) the content management; (vii) the approaches on content recommendation and personalization; (viii) the principled of subjects' navigation in space and methods of navigation assistance; (ix) the discovery and planning of effective cultural visits routes; (x) methods and approaches for understanding of space properties and their effect on users'-visitors' navigation and interaction, is given.
	In the present thesis, (i) the requirements for effective Cultural Heritage communication in Virtual Environment; (ii) an methodology for implementing Cultural Heritage Virtual Environments; (iii) the architecture to provide their operation, are discussed and proposed as guidelines and solutions for similar cases. In addition to the implementation of Cultural Heritage Virtual Environment issues of their execution on computer machines are studied
	and more specifically the issue of performance as Virtual Environment's realism and the visualization of Cultural Heritage in high quality are demanding in computer resources. A set of tests is conducted showing that as realism and quality is increased the system's performance is reduced. In these tests the ability to reduce quality without affecting users experience is investigated. Also, usability aspects of Cultural Heritage Virtual Envi- ronments are studied focusing on users navigation in the represented space where two (2) approaches are tested and evaluated, namely: (i) free navigation; and (ii) fixed navigation. These two approaches are tested for their effectiveness depending on varying demographic factors aiming to provide the ability to recommend navigation method according to user's profile. Furthermore, navigation assistance methods are studied and proposed in order to enhance usability of free navigation.
	The research work review shows that there are no content management solutions specifically designed to provide services for Cultural Heritage Virtual Environments. Given that content management is considered to be a necessity for effective communication and personalization a framework to support Cultural Heritage Virtual Environments content and functionality is proposed. The discussed framework provides functionality for Cultural Heritage Virtual Environments and also for third-party applications of other types. A con- tent recommendation model is developed and proposed. The proposed recommendation model takes advantage of the content organization provided by the content management framework and provides cultural recommendation according to users' interests.
	In order to provide personalized visits in Cultural Heritage Environments approaches resulting visiting recommendations that take into consideration users' interests and constraints are studied. In order to provide these recommendations, route planning approaches aiming at the discovery of routes are implemented. The discovered routes include the recommended objects of interest that will provide the maximum profit to users under user defined time constraints and spatial constraints consisting of users' starting point and users' target point. Route planing algorithms seeking to provide maximum profit are complex and computational intensive tasks and their computational difficulty is increased as the considered graph's or recommendations number are increased. In order to provide computationally efficient solutions approximate techniques are developed and tested for their efficiency and accuracy.
	The effort for personalized cultural visits leads to the personalization of cultural spaces. In the present thesis the concept of personalized distance effective exhibition designs is introduced as an approach to provide cultural spaces hosting objects of cultural heritage
	according to visitors'-users' interest while serving to keep the visit time below the user defined time constraints. A set of topologies providing the cultural space's structure are proposed. These topologies are designed in order to facilitate navigation, enhance interaction with the exhibitions and provide scalable spaces. The proposed topologies distance-effective property is studied and their results are compared.},
	author = {Komianos, Vasileios},
	date-modified = {2021-11-13 16:44:00 +0200},
	keywords = {stphdthesis, iivw, R:VR},
	month = {11},
	school = {Ionian University},
	title = {{{Content Personalization Approaches in Cultural Heritage (Real, Virtual and Mixed) Environments}}},
	type = {{Ph.D. Thesis}},
	year = {2017}}