# 3D Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage Sites as an Educational Approach. The Sanctuary of Delphi
## 3 The Rationale and Design: An Educational Virtual Tour at the Sanctuary of Delphi  
Delphi in ancient times was considered to be the center of the world, where in the famous sanctuary, dedicated to the god [PERSON], the priestess [PERSON] gave many oracles [62; 63]. The history of Delphi may have been known to most university students of Archaeology via university lessons, but it is not easy for them to visit the archaeological site and conduct in-situ research. The rationale and concept here is to make the Delphi sanctuary accessible via modern technology tools. We have designed an educational application, taking into account that this refers to archaeology students, that offers a virtual tour at the Sanctuary of Delphi enhanced with learning material. The virtual environment presents an accurate representation of the site, created based on real landscape data and digitized or reconstructed models of buildings and artefacts. The environment includes rich educational material in the form of text, audio narrations and videos, that is associated with the respective places, buildings, or landmarks of the environment. Additionally, it includes a collection of more generic information about the place and its history in the form of frequently asked questions, which is periodically updated by experts based on new questions posted by students in the environment. Thus, our application follows the educational approaches (serious gaming) of discovery learning, as students have to explore and discover the educational content, and situated learning, as the content is presented to them in a virtual representation of the environment that is the subject of learning. Finally, students contribute to the content by posting their own questions and remarks that are used to update and enhance the educational material. In present pilot project, there is not a main story as in most games. Additionally, there are no rewards, badges, or points systems. However, here the serious games elements include (i) a first-person controller which walks through all the sacred road and near the 3D buildings and monuments, (ii) a personalized feedback. Answers are given by email (after few days) to students for individual questions submitted through the special form anytime during the virtual tour, (iii) Simulation. The real environment of the archeological site has been simulated and enriched with 3D buildings and monuments, (iv) The goal is learning. Serious games should have a purpose that is not entertaining and is almost always related to a specific aspect of education or training. The main purpose of the present virtual tour is to educate archeology students, as have been described in this section. The application design runs as follows: (i) it is a single-user first-person Desktop virtual environment. When users connect to this environment, they find themselves located in the virtual reconstruction of the Delphi Sanctuary, (ii) then, they can freely explore the place in a walking metaphor using keyboard input, a technique familiar from first-person navigation in 3D games, (iii) the environment has been designed with appropriate colliders and obstacles to ensure that the user's motion is restricted to specific paths and to avoid users being trapped or disoriented, (iv) a virtual human (or NPC as it is termed in games) is walking around in the place to create a sense of a 'living' space and to motivate users to follow it and further explore the environment, (v) while users are approaching a place of interest, the associated educational material is visualized as a set of media annotations, and they can activate it by pointing and clicking on it, (vi) depending on the content, images, videos, or textual descriptions that appear in a floating window. The text is also narrated for easier access, (vii) finally, a short menu is available to the users to further support their activities.