Conclusion

South Africa has a wealth of cultural heritage sites that contain fragile links to the rich past of the land. Some of these sites are in danger of degradation due to time, erosion and vandalism. The key to protecting these sites lies in educating local citizens and the general public about the heritage and importance of the information contained there and teaching them to become stewards of the local heritage.

The Archaeology and Geomatics departments at the University of Cape Town have information and data that can be used to educate the public about local heritage. The School of Rock Art website was designed to use this information in a manner that allows scholars and researchers alike to use these resources for learning. The website was composed of three components and this report details the development of the Cave Navigation component. This component makes use of laser scans of the heritage sites from the Geomatics Department and images from the database from the Archaeology Department. These resources are used to build a Web-based system that allows users to explore the heritage sites and examine photographs of the artwork taken there. A user experience evaluation, using students of the University of Cape Town as voluntary participants, was used to determine if the final iterations of each of the components of the website satisfied this question.

The cave navigation component was built in order to answer the research question of: Is it possible to build a usable and useful 3D cave navigation system to encourage learning about rock art? The evaluation of this component revealed that users enjoyed using the cave navigation system and thought that it was a useful component. While the responses did indicate that the controls system used requires training and therefore the system does not exhibit the Learnability attribute of usability, the system does exhibit the usability attributes related to Simplicity, Satisfaction and Error. Therefore the system can be considered to be usable and useful. It was also shown to be plausible that the system encourages learning about rock art. Thus positively answering the research question.