ABSTRACT

Difficult Heritage and Immersive Experiences examines the benefits involved in designing and employing immersive technologies to reconstruct difficult pasts at heritage sites around the world.

Presenting interdisciplinary case studies of heritage sites and museums from across a range of different contexts, the volume analyzes the ways in which various types of immersive technologies can help visitors to contextualize and negotiate difficult or sensitive heritage and traumatic pasts. Demonstrating that some of the most creative applications of immersive experiences appear in and at museums and heritage sites, the book showcases how immersive technologies offer the possibility of confronting and disputing presumptions and prejudices, triggering responses, delivering new knowledge, initiating dialogue and challenging preexistingnotions of collective identity. The book provides a conceptual, as well as a hands-on, approach to understanding the use of immersive technologies at sensitive sites around the globe.

Difficult Heritage and Immersive Experiences is essential reading for researchers and students who are interested in, or engaged in the study of, cultural heritage, memory, history, politics, dark tourism, design and digital media or immersive technologies. The book will also be of interest to museum and heritage practitioners.

chapter 1|13 pages

Difficult heritage and immersive experiences

Immersion, impersonation and engagement in dangerous pasts – Limits, effects and ethics of immersive heritage experiences

chapter 3|19 pages

Remaking Confucian Rites

Reenactment, immersive visualization and the revitalization of the marginalized cosmological body

chapter 5|24 pages

VR as critical historiography

The case of Wadi Salib in Haifa

chapter 6|19 pages

Virtual history

VR, immersion and learning Holocaust history