Multimodal digital archiving and reproduction of the world cultural heritage "Gion Festival in Kyoto"

We propose a multimodal digital archiving and reproduction of the world cultural heritage "Gion Festival in Kyoto". In this digital museum project, we make "Virtual Kyoto" more highly-developed and detailed, and develop the system where users can experience the things and events related to Gion Festival with several virtual reality technologies. Specifically, we develop the interactive system based on human five senses such as the contents where users can experience high-defined decorations of Yamahoko with visual and haptic senses, the high-quality sounds of the Festival music and the virtual Yamahoko float ceremony in the 3D vision environment combined these contents. "Virtual Kyoto" is 4 dimensionality city model with GIS and VR technologies, and the platform where the aspect of historical city, Kyoto can be rendered from past to present. Therefore, users can select any period and location and experience the contents of histories, cultures, arts and entertainments in "Virtual Kyoto". Moreover, we can not only handle high order contents but also describe many kinds of contents synthesizing them. This paper describes a multimodal digital archiving and reproduction of Gion Festival and virtual experience of parading of floats in detail.