M. Ioannides (Ed.): EuroMed 2010, LNCS 6436, pp. 140–152, 2010. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 Same Same But Different – Comparing Rendering Environments for Interactive Digital Objects M. Guttenbrunner 1,2 , J. Wieners 3 , A. Rauber 1 , and M. Thaller 3 1 Vienna University of Technology, 1040 Vienna, Austria {guttenbrunner,rauber}@ifs.tuwien.ac.at 2 Secure Business Austria, 1040 Vienna, Austria mguttenbrunner@sba-research.org 3 University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany {jan.wieners,manfred.thaller}@uni-koeln.de Abstract. Digital cultural heritage in interactive form can take different shapes. It can be either in the form of interactive virtual representations of non-digital objects like buildings or nature, but also as born digital materials like interactive art and video games. To preserve these materials for a long term, we need to perform preservation actions on them. To check the validity of these actions, the original and the preserved form have to be compared. While static informa- tion like images or text documents can be migrated to new formats, especially digital objects which are interactive have to be preserved using new rendering environments. In this paper we show how the results of rendering an object in different en- vironments can be compared. We present a workflow with three stages that sup- ports the execution of digital objects in a rendering environment, the application of interactive actions in a standardized way to ensure no deviations due to dif- ferent interactions, and the XCL Layout processor application that extends the characterized screenshots of the rendering results by adding information about significant areas in the screenshot allowing us to compare the rendering results. We present case studies on interactive fiction and a chess program that show that the approach is valid and that the rendering results can be successfully compared. Keywords: Digital Preservation, Rendering, Preservation Planning, Characteri- zation, Emulation, Image Segmentation. 1 Introduction As more and more representations of our cultural heritage are recreated in digital and interactive form (e.g. interactive models of buildings [1], nature areas [2] or ancient cities [3], we have to ensure, that these representations can be accessed in future ren- dering environments as well. Also born digital materials like interactive art and video games have to be preserved as part of our digital cultural heritage. Most recent digital preservation projects concentrated on migration of documents as a main strategy for preserving images and documents. Automatic evaluation of the