Museums are institutions that primarily care for cultural heritage exhibition, preservation and conservation of historical artifacts. However, simply displaying artifacts and provide complex information to describe them is simply not sufficient to effectively engage museum visitors. To improve visitors engagement and their overall museum experience, the use of technology utilized by museums, introducing the concept of Virtual Museums. This paper discusses the use of Virtual Reality through the use of smart phone devices as a mean of a Cyber-Physical-Social system to support, improve and enhance the visitors' experience.
The RoboSHU prototype, its current development stage and future work are presented, together with the future research directions of the research team. Available from here.

The rapid developments in online technology have provided young people with instant communication with each other and highly interactive and engaging visual game playing environments. The traditional ways of presenting museum and heritage assets no longer, therefore, hold their attention and provide them with an exciting and dynamic visitor experience. There is considerable interest in the use of augmented reality to allow visitors to explore worlds that are not immediately accessible to them and relating them to the real worlds around them. These are very effective in providing much needed contextual information, but appear rather static when compared with multi-player games environments where players interact with each other and robotic characters (non-player characters) in real time. By fusing these technologies, the authors postulate a new type of conceptually-led environment (cyber museum) that fuses real (physical), virtual worlds and cyber-social spaces into a single dynamic environment that provides a unique experience of exploring both worlds simultaneously. Available from here

This paper reports on the open session help during the International Conference on Resilience and Sustainability of Cities in Hazardous Environments, where the aim was to discuss how the modern technology of robotics, virtual reality, and gaming could help in preserving cultural heritage sites. There is a plethora of achievements in this technology, but how and whether their fusion can add a new dimension to the preservation of cultural heritage sites and untimely contribute to their resilience and sustainability in our rapidly changing world is open to discussions and further research incestigations. Available from here.