Culture 4 all: accessibility-enabled cultural experiences through immersive VR360 content

The use of virtual reality (VR) technologies and, in particular, of VR360 content can provide great benefits in the society. This particularly applies to the culture and heritage sectors, where venues, goods and events can be digitalised to provide hyper-realistic and engaging experiences, anywhere and anytime. Despite significant advances in the field of VR, there is still an unexplored aspect which is crucial for every service and experience where user interaction is expected: accessibility. This article firstly reviews the needs, challenges and limitations for making VR360 experiences accessible. Based on these facts, an end-to-end platform to efficiently integrate accessibility services within VR360 content is presented. The platform encompasses all steps from media authoring to media consumption, but special attention is given to the accessibility-enabled VR360 player, as it is the end user interaction interface. The presentation modes for the supported access services (like subtitling, audio description and sign language), interaction modalities and personalisation features supported by the player are described. To conclude, the availability of newly created and adapted culture-related accessible VR360 content is explored, as a proof of the potential of the contributions work in this sector.