Citation: Luther, W.; Baloian, N.;
Biella, D.; Sacher, D. Digital Twins
and Enabling Technologies in
Museums and Cultural Heritage:
An Overview. Sensors 2023, 23, 1583.
https://doi.org/10.3390/s23031583
Academic Editors: Zhihan Lv, Kai Xu
and Zhigeng Pan
Received: 29 December 2022
Revised: 27 January 2023
Accepted: 28 January 2023
Published: 1 February 2023
Copyright: © 2023 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Review
Digital Twins and Enabling Technologies in Museums and
Cultural Heritage: An Overview
Wolfram Luther
1,
* , Nelson Baloian
2
, Daniel Biella
3
and Daniel Sacher
1
1
Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science, University of Duisburg-Essen,
47057 Duisburg, Germany
2
Department of Computer Science, University of Chile, Av. Blanco Encalada 2120, Santiago 8320000, Chile
3
Center for Information and Media Services, University of Duisburg-Essen, 47057 Duisburg, Germany
* Correspondence: wolfram.luther@gmail.com; Tel.: +49-16096364247 or +49-2033793556
Abstract:
This paper presents an overview of various types of virtual museums (ViM) as native
artifacts or as digital twins (DT) of physical museums (PM). Depending on their mission and features,
we discuss various enabling technologies and sensor equipment with their specific requirements and
complexities, advantages and drawbacks in relation to each other at all stages of a DT’s life cycle. A
DT is a virtual construct and embodies innovative concepts based on emerging technologies (ET)
using adequate sensor configurations for (meta-)data import and exchange. Our keyword-based
search for articles, conference papers, (chapters from) books and reviews yielded 43 contributions
and 43 further important references from Industry 4.0, Tourism and Heritage 4.0. After closer
examination, a reference corpus of 40 contributions was evaluated in detail and classified along
with their variants of DT—content-, communication-, and collaboration-centric and risk-informed
ViMs. Their system features correlate with different application areas (AA), new or improved
technologies—mostly still under development—and sensors used. Our proposal suggests a template-
based, generative approach to DTs using standardized metadata formats, expert/curator software
and customers’/visitors’ engagement. It advocates for stakeholders’ collaboration as part of a
comprehensive validation and verification assessment (V&VA) throughout the DT’s entire life cycle.
Keywords: virtual museum; digital twin; emerging technologies; sensor
1. Introduction
All areas of society are witnessing the digitization of data, objects and digitalization of
services, networked information and communication processes in the areas of industry and
administration, production, commerce, finance, logistics and transportation, healthcare
and nursing, education and learning, and leisure, sports and tourism—along with all their
diverse cultural offerings. This trend is reflected in the introduction of related concepts
for digital transformation and has strongly promoted the development and application
of enabling and emerging technologies in the aforementioned areas. It has also led to the
(sensor-based) collection of data from a wide variety of sources used for the construction
of parallel virtual spaces and worlds and their colonization by digital twins that interact
with each other. This process requires redistributing tasks and further developing cultural
techniques, which contribute considerably to the transformation of the living spaces and
habits of humans and animals in all areas of daily life. Digital transformation and techno-
logical progress have benefitted the working world through the elimination of simple or
physically demanding activities in favor of highly skilled ones and led to breakthrough
advances in the sciences, medicine, social life and leisure activities [1–3].
1.1. The Purpose of the Article
In this paper, we focus on digital transformation in leisure activities, especially all
kinds of museums, exhibitions and their DTs. Through a literature search and evaluation,
Sensors 2023, 23, 1583. https://doi.org/10.3390/s23031583 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors
