Multi-Sensory Virtual Environments for Investigating the Past

A human depends on all five senses: visuals, audio, smell, taste and touch to perceive an environment. It is not only the individual senses, but also their interaction that plays a key role in enabling us to understand the world around us. Virtual archaeology is being increasingly used to investigate the past. Failure to consider all senses in these reconstructions runs the very real danger of misrepresenting ancient environments and how they may have been perceived by our ancestors. This paper describes Real Virtuality: true high-fidelity multi-sensory virtual environments, and shows how such an approach may give historians a more valid means of considering the past