Embodied Virtual Communities: a new opportunity for the research in the field of Cultural Heritage

he VHLab of CNR-ITABC and the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts of UC Merced are developing new research projects oriented to the study and communication of cultural heritage through multiuser virtual reality applications, off and on line. Despite the great diffusion of applications based on social networking, the knowledge in this field is at its beginning: there are still few multiuser domains for sharing and exchanging cultural and scientific contents and also for the communication of cultural heritage. A FIRB project, "Integrated Technologies of robotics and virtual environment in archaeology", financed by the Italian Ministry of the University and Scientific Research, gives us the occasion to experiment and realize a collaborative multiuser environment in the web destinated to the scientific community. The project is a pioneering prototype, an innovative contribute in terms of methodology and learning, for the simulation and the interpretation of cultural archaeological contexts. Experts can achieve many advantages from this kind of virtual share informations, ideas, test simulations and exchange data. 1.INTRODUCTION 1.1 State of the art and innovation of the project 3D virtual communities are spreading on the web: millions of people want to interconnect, share information and build contents jointly. Multiuser environments increase information exchange, feedback and co-interpretation. However it is essential to understand what interaction metaphors, what principles of personal and collective motivation, which cognitive dynamics are most effective to share knowledge construction and communication in the field of cultural heritage (Jones, 2003). Although currently we can count many applications on 3D virtual reconstructions in archaeology and in computer graphics, there are no example of 3D scientific collaborative environments for interpretation and simulation goals. This gap is mainly due to the emphasis on the communication aspect, the final reconstruction, while few attentions are paid to the validation and transparency of the reconstruction process (Forte, Pescarin, Pietroni, 2006). One of the key critical point in the reconstruction is in the capacity to show the relations (spatial-temporal, semantic, symbolic, interpretative, etc.) between the final result (the "model") and the interpretation process (the "input"). The virtual reconstruction is basically a simulation process and it needs a cooperative work and a discussion in all the stages of research: to show a spectacular model just visualizing the final result has no impact in the interpretation process. In this case the scientific community has just to accept or reject the final interpretation without the ability to discuss it in any term. environments and tools of interaction; first of all the possibility to