Writing is an essential cultural technique that shaped our world's societies and is an important cultural heritage. The Cluster of Excellence 'Understanding Written Artefacts' is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural long-term project dedicated to studying so-called 'Written Artefacts (WA)', which include all sorts of objects on which visual signs are applied by hand. Through our work, the research field of human-computer interaction is represented in the Cluster for the first time. This paper introduces our interdisciplinary research on immersive applications for understanding WA. We motivate the usage of virtual reality (VR) technologies for the novel field of WA research, in which we explore new immersive ways of studying WA. Currently, only fieldwork provides the spatial context to the WA in the inscribed spaces. Immersive applications could provide researchers with virtual access to the spatial and even temporal context at any time, but so far, VR has not been used in academia for this use case. We developed two immersive VR systems with a user-centred design approach in close cooperation with academic experts from ancient history, classical archaeology, and theology, among other fields. Our VR systems visualize WA with their temporal and spatial context and provide additional content such as reconstructions, hidden layers, and meta information. Our tool was developed for two different application scenarios, (1) a large outdoor scenario of the ancient Roman theatre of Miletus, and (2) an interior scenario of the church at the Rittergut Lucklum.

The research for this paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.