Abstract:

Reconstruction and modeling of urban environments and old archeological cities has become an important task in today’s industry. In general, the 3D modeling area involves three-dimensional geometry creating and corresponding textures based on captured input data in an urban environment. Currently, this is an extensive field of research, affecting not only the space of computer graphics, computer vision and computational geometry, but also several applications - such as urban planning, cultural heritage, three-dimensional lightings, design or research. Through technical advances combined with drastic price reductions, the applied techniques (such as laser scanners, photogrammetry or infrared range scanners) have become highly sophisticated and widely used tools. They generate huge amounts of point-based data (i.e. a large number of three-dimensional coordinates of the captured surfaces, sometimes with metadata such as color, vectors, etc.) of different types of objects.

This paper examines the application of 3D technologies in the development of tourism and promotion of cultural and historical heritage. The main emphasis is placed on the new direction in the application of mixed reality in tourism. Virtual and augmented reality are used not only in the advertising of tourist sites, but also the opportunity for tourists to meet and see in a new way cultural and historical sites.

In this paper we will present some illustrative examples of digitalization of historical sites and monuments through photogrammetry and three-dimensional modeling. The results were obtained by students studying the preservation of cultural and historical heritage. We will show the first reconstructions of the ancient city Skaptopara located in South-West Bulgaria. The three-dimensional reconstructions were obtained as a results of the project "Application of the mixed reality in the training and promotion of the cultural heritage for the purposes of the in the university information environment "work of Prof. Peteva.

Keywords:

3d Technologies, Virtual Tourism.