Hal Thwaites, Canada | ISBN: | Submitted: Jul 1, 1998

Ville de Quebec: A Case Study and Proposal for a Virtual World Heritage Site

Quebec city, founded in 1608 by Samuel De Champlain in the name of the king of France, is now the administrative capital of the province of Quebec located in eastern Canada. It has been declared a World Heritage city in 1985 and now hosts the headquarters of the UNESCO's World Heritage Cities.

It is a very large site of 135 hectares comprising upper town, the fortifications, the part of the city withing the walls, lower town, military buidings and some civil neighbourhoods. More than 300 civil buildings constitute this heritage city of which 2% date from the 17th century, 8% from the 18th and 22% from the beginning to the middle of the 19th century. Out of 300, 20 are considered exceptional historical monuments.

The city of Quebec is one of the first to have implemented a strict preservation policy with architectural guidelines for any renovations and restaurations. It has invested in the preservation of the artefacts of the city which constitute the cultural base of the population of Quebec and the historical starting point of Canada.

In order to promote and make the city known to the general public and tourists, multimedia has been used to create a CD entitled 'Virtual Quebec'. This product is the closest representation of a Virtual World Heritage (VWH) site at this moment. The particularity of this CD and the proposal is the number of items mandatory to incorporate into a virtual heritage site in order to make a coherent and complete enough representation. Virtual Quebec comprises 2000 images,175 QuickTime VR panoramas with ambient sound, 2 hours of animation and video sequences, 150 points of interest in an indexed searchable database. This paper discusses the complexity and depth of this project with examples and sequences taken from Virtual Quebec CD in a case study format in order to illustrate the principles of Communication Analysis Protocol (CAP) applied to the proposal for a Virtual World Heritage site on Quebec city.

Due to the number of elements planned in this project, we forsee it being created in a modular way allowing different teams working in cooperation using CAP and different technologies in order to constitute one of the largest, richest, and most complete sites ever done. Some examples of modules include: Champlain's house that does not exist today, missing gates within the fortifications, previous burned down versions of the actual Notre-Dame basilica and recreations of actual historical buildings (F.-X. Garneau house among others).

Finally, the proposal will open discussion on delivery systems and how the public might experience and have access to this VWH work.

GRAPHIC: NONE

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[keywords]
virtual world heritage, VR, 3D media design