Preserving the past within the collective memories of people is one of the ultimate goals of creative industries. Virtual cultural heritage applications recreate history by inviting users to time-travel. One of the more popular approaches for enhancing the immersion of time-travelers within virtual environments is interactive digital story- telling, which enables them to learn while exploring. While the process of developing interactive digital story-telling applications is still complex, involving professionals from various artistic and scientific disciplines, significant technological advances have recently been made towards improving content production. Namely, advance Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems are capable of capturing hundreds of thousands of points within a second, thus creating extremely accurate representation of cultural sites. Usually mounted on airplanes, they produce high-resolution point-clouds with densities ranging up to several hundreds of points per square meter. However, the lack of topology, huge data sizes, and the contained noise, requires new data processing, storage, and management approaches before these data can be successfully utilized.

This project explored an advanced pipeline for creating virtual worlds as environments for interactive digital story-telling through augmented reality applications on mobile devices. By considering the challenges and issues arising during this process, developments in content creation, warehousing, editing, and postproduction were demonstrated through   implementation of the end-user application. Automatic approaches were developed for this purpose, including the generation of 3D models from LiDAR data, together with advanced storage and organization of 3D content, thus providing a holistic overview on information management within digital story-telling.