December 14, 2021

On 14 December 1992, the Tampines Chinese Temple was officially opened by then Minister for Communications and Development Mr Mah Bow Tan. The temple is used to house deities from nine Chinese temples located nearby, which had to be demolished to make way for further development of the Tampines area.

Virtual tours are envisioned to provide an immersive experience through the physical built environment and intangible historic and sociocultural elements. However, virtual tours have either neglected some (in)tangible dimensions, or are limited due to the sophisticated technologies and expertise required to incorporate these dimensions. ‘Generating a virtual tour for the preservation of the (in)tangible cultural heritage of Tampines Chinese Temple in Singapore’ (Journal of Cultural Heritage, 2019) explored the ease of reproducing virtual tours.

Through a collaboration between the Department of Chinese Studies and the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore, Mr Osten Bang Ping Mah (NUS Geography) and his co-authors examine how a low-cost yet efficient methodology of creating virtual tours could preserve the (in)tangible elements of the Tampines Chinese Temple together in a ‘unified interface’. The authors argue that accessible methods of creating virtual tours will support heritage preservation. A 360◦ camera and two-dimensional (2D) high-resolution images from a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera were used to recreate high quality panoramic images while minimising technological costs and expertise. In the data processing back-room, a triad of software packages was adopted. This was to allow free movement within a virtual tour and geo-tags to convey historic and religious information, while minimising human intervention when processing images.

In order to develop an intuitive and realistic user experience, a plethora of viewpoints allowed users to navigate freely around the temple. Pushpins supported the user experience by containing information on the temple’s history and religious symbolism. In doing so, the researchers posit that virtual tours would appeal to the technologically-savvy generation of Singaporeans, as well as those interested in exploring depths of temple cultural heritage. Through such rigorous recreation of a heritage sites, Mah et al. propose that virtual tours will serve as a useful platform to showcase the aesthetics of the temple, while presenting the rich historic and sociocultural information through intuitive and user-friendly means.

Read the article here.