Digitize the Architectural Heritage in Egypt to Overcome the Repercussions of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The world has faced a lot of unprecedented economic and social repercussions in its modern history. For instance, the spread of many diseases such as Covid-19, wars, and climate change. That led to stagnation in many sectors of development. As a result of these events, the governments tended to mitigate the impact of these repercussions by exploiting new technological tools and techniques, such as extended reality, digital marketing, and website development. In fact, the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the tourism sector around the world in the last 3 years. And whereas Egypt owns a third of the world's monuments, which represent the architectural legacies spread over large and multiple areas. From this point of view, this study discusses how to combine these monuments in an integrated project through digitizing architectural heritage on a website that works with modern technology techniques, especially extended reality technology to promote the tourism sector in Egypt, hence increasing the national income. On the other hand, this study also aimed to formulate a hypothetical vision of how to preserve, document, develop and invest in all archaeological buildings at the lowest possible cost, help to immerse yourself in it either completely or partially, query, and identify its elements and components textually, audibly, visually, and sensually. To achieve the study objectives, four steps were undertaken. First, the selection of a case study and virtual documentation of architectural heritage;second, a practical experiment was implemented using the extended reality technology;third, a questionnaire was conducted for the users of the experiment;and fourth, an evaluation by statistical analysis was implemented. From these four steps, a map of Egypt for architectural heritage was carried out. This map not only helps to revitalize the tourism sector but also enhances electronic documentation, and the restoration, and rehabilitation process of the monuments. Hence, preserving the cultural heritage of Egypt. © 2023 by authors. All rights reserved.