LabInVirtuo, a Method for Designing, Restoring and Updating Virtual Environments for Science and Technology from Heterogeneous Digital Corpus

The project is located in the field of knowledge engineering, virtual reality and digital humanities on the theme of human activity versus history and heritage of industrial cultural landscapes. Our objectives are to develop and validate virtual laboratories, cross-disciplinary research methods, collaborative methods involving institutions or other actors in cultural history, and the digital preservation and cultural facilitation of industrial trades. Our hypothesis is that a Sensory Realistic Intelligent Virtual Environment where the body is engaged results in a better retrieval of knowledge, a better elicitation, the possibility of capturing gestures and embodied knowledge, and new facilitation methods. Collaborative VR makes it possible to develop multidisciplinary research methods and innovative facilitation scenarios with a qualitative and quantitative leap forward concerning elicitation and the restitution of knowledge and know how.