We All Live in a Virtual Submarine

Abstract

The Venus (Virtual Exploration of Underwater Sites) project pooled expertise in disciplines including archaeology, underwater exploration, marine robotics and instrumentation, knowledge representation, photogrammetry, virtual reality, and digital data preservation. It resulted in a series of best practices and procedures for collecting, storing, and visualizing underwater-archaeology data. The variety of visualization tools developed on the project were more successful with the general public than with the archaeologists. However, younger archaeologists (for example, PhD students) expressed enthusiasm for these tools.