A System Design of Virtual Reality Enabled Chinese Ancient Books for Enhancing Reading Promotion and Culture Dissemination

Abstract

Chinese ancient books (CABs) possess precious values in the aspects of Chinese literature, cultural relics, history, and arts. However, ordinary modern Chinese readers have language and cultural barriers to understanding CABs, which leads to the reader group of CABs being limited in the Chinese literature and historical research field. To enhance CABs reading promotion and Chinese culture dissemination, this paper aims to explore the method of using cultural tourism resources to illustrate CABs text in a virtual reality (VR) environment. It specifically illustrates text elements and narrative storylines contained in CABs to reduce readers’ difficulties in CABs’ reading comprehension, improve their reading interest, achieve the purpose of CABs reading promotion from a minority group to mass readers. This paper systematically analyzes the relevant VR cultural heritage applications and develops a VR CAB prototype based on one case. It contributes a VR CAB design method and verifies the feasibility and value of the VR CAB prototype by using illustration resources from LAMs and cultural tourism fields.