Summary form only given. We present a method how to create locally and globally interesting stories for virtual museums in a relatively short time. The local interestingness is understood in a Koestlerian way (AH, AHA, HAHA bisociation effects). Global interestingness is achieved by discovering, within the given unique material, options for relating unrelated contexts, internal poetry and/or change of the narration mode. The craft of storytelling resulted in five short movies, completed during the South-East European Virtual Heritage School: Digital Storytelling for Virtual Museums. These intereStories“ are intentionally aimed at overcoming multiple limitations of backtelling, frequent in virtual museums. The five themes include Bosnian blues Sevdah, fate of Sephardic Jews, existing and nonexisting urban area, and traditional Bosnian coffee. The stories were coauthored by 15 beginners storytellers in groups (24 authors) in 5 days alongside with the 12 lectures on theory and narrative case studies from V-must network good practice. Besides the brainstormings, speed-up focused brainwritting feedback was provided twice: once for preexistent stories, second for betaversions. The final creations were produced in Adobe Premiere Pro and published at YouTube.

The cross-modal interaction between vision and other senses is a key part of how we perceive the real world. Significant stimulation to hearing, sense of smell, taste or touch can reduce the cognitive resources the brain is able to allocate to sight, and thus limit what the Human Visual System (HVS) can actually perceive at that moment. Selective rendering is able to exploit such knowledge of the HVS, to render those parts of a virtual environment a viewer is attending to at a high quality and the rest of the scene at a much lower quality, and thus at a substantially reduced rendering time, without the viewer being aware of this quality difference. This paper investigates how the presence of the modalities of sound, smell and ambient temperature in a virtual environment significantly affects a viewer's ability to perceive the quality of the graphics used for that environment. Experiments were run with a total of 356 participants to determine the graphics quality thresholds across the different cross-modal interactions. The results revealed a significant effect of strong perfume, high temperature and audio noise on perceived rendering quality. Under given conditions, this particular combination of modalities can be thus exploited when rendering virtual environments, to substantially reduce rendering time without any loss in the user's perception of delivered visual quality.

Bosnia and Herzegovina always has been a place where the East meets the West. Over 1000 years, different cultures, religions and civilizations have left their remains in this small country in Western Balkans. Despite all wars and tragic destructions, today in the heart of Sarajevo one can find mosques, Catholic and Orthodox churches and Jewish synagogues next to each other and people of different nations and religions living together in mutual respect and friendship. Multiethnic spirit of Bosnia and Herzegovina lives through its cultural heritage. Therefore our task is to ensure its presentation and preservation using Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). So far researchers have achieved significant results by creating several virtual museums. In this paper we will present the Museum of Bosnian Traditional Objects, Digital Catalogue of Stecaks and the Virtual Museum of Sarajevo Assassination, giving an overview of the process of creating virtual environments from multiple data sources based on various 3D digitization technologies: some based on traditional 3D modeling, other based on laser scanning or photogrametric techniques.