# Virtual Environments and Augmented Reality Applied to Heritage Education. An Evaluative Study
## 1 Introduction  
### Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Applied to Heritage Education  
The emergence of digital and portable technology, which enables us to experience heritage in situ, provides great opportunities for heritage education, and the changing role that this type of technology provides to the transmission of knowledge must be recognised. Nowadays, the digital realm is the perfect context for heritage education [1], due to the fact that processes of knowledge, comprehension, enhancement, awareness, and enjoyment of cultural heritage take place on the internet, making it a means of identity in a universal context [2, 3]. Therefore, several studies [4, 5] have analysed the extent to which the digital environment democratises, educates, and socialises heritage, which has gone from being a physical place to possessing a virtual facet. Learning in these digital environments is a process which is free from restrictions; it proposes new rules, tools for communication, and contexts for interaction. In this regard, virtualisation has supposed one of the greatest impacts on the mediation of heritage, the most common use of which, up to the present moment, has been the creation of educational itineraries in historical sites [6]. The first uses of virtual reality (VR) applications focusing on cultural heritage in the classroom employed gamification as a learning technique [7]. Nowadays, there is an abundance of research on educational proposals for working with heritage based on games created ex profeso [8] or making use of pre-existing videogames and their historical settings, such as Assassins Creed or its educational versions, Classcraft and Minecraft Education edition [9]. In the field of heritage education, there is currently a significant increase in the presence of applications based on geolocation, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). Some authors consider AR and VR as new tools for accessing information and that they facilitate learning processes [10], and this premise has already been addressed by some studies that raise research on how the use of these tools contributes significantly to the teaching-learning processes from different areas of knowledge [11; 12]. In this way, if VR supplants reality and makes it possible to create inexistent settings (be they real or imaginary), AR complements it, enabling the learner to interpret, for example, archaeological remains or modified urban areas. Both techniques make it possible to develop immersive contexts which offer a greater degree of sensorial perception [13] via the recreation of environments [14] and inexistent places and constructions [15], to visualise the whole or a part of an object without damaging the original [16], to walk a route upon which virtual information is superimposed on places of interest [17], to be accompanied by a virtual guide during a route [18], and to play interactive games in which virtual and real aspects are combined [19; 20]. All of these possibilities can be offered via specific digital platforms, virtual museums [21], and even in situ, making use of GPS [18] and QR codes [22]. In addition, the use of other devices, such as Google Glass [23] or other types of visors, have been used for this objective, albeit with the limitation that it is an added resource which the user must have at his/her disposal. At the present time, work with 3D and 360\({}^{\circ}\) images, the use of global positioning systems, the introduction of GoPro cameras, drones, and photogrammetry are in the vanguard of education. This new technological generation is modifying the way we relate to heritage, leading to a broadening of knowledge, an improvement in the understanding of cultural assets, a greater degree of global accessibility, and an increase in approaches and methodologies with which we can interact with heritage.