ABSTRACT
The use of virtual reality is spreading in museums and cultural heritage settings, offering new opportunities both for archaeological, art-historical and other related scholarship, but also for public education and interpretation activities, which can be impressive and entertaining. Yet, this much advertised potential has in most cases not been fulfilled to its full extent (Stone 2005), due to a variety of practical problems, such as high development and maintenance costs, but also due to conceptual limitations, such as the use of a new medium in traditional and restricting ways, replicating old paradigms, or resistance and suspicion from archaeologists and related experts in the field who still prefer to use the written form for presenting their work (Niccolucci 2002; Staley 2003), as this offers tested ways of checking for validity and is more closely associated with professional credibility and recognition. However, despite these difficulties,
the newly developed field of Virtual Heritage (VH), which is formed by the intersection of Virtual Reality (VR) with cultural heritage, continues to develop, borrowing from various disciplines (Roussou 2002).
