A Combined Study of Cultural Heritage in Archaeological Museums: 3D Survey and Mixed Reality

Abstract

Nowadays, a great interest in historical installations like museographic devices in international museological studies (capable of giving space form during user communication) is largely attributable to new techniques of immediate communication. Tools and libraries for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality content have recently become increasingly available. Despite its increased cost and investment, these are new ways for increasing visitor presence in museums. The purpose of this paper is to describe the potential of a tourist/archaeological application suitably developed and implemented by us. The application was developed in Unity3D and allows the user to view cultural heritage in a virtual environment, making information, multimedia content, and metrically precise 3D models available and accessible (obtained after a phase of reducing the mesh border), useful for obtaining good 3D printing reproduction. The strengths of our application (compared to the many already in the literature, which are also used as research ideas) stem from the possibility of using and easily integrating different techniques (3D models, building information models, virtual and augmented reality) allowing the choice of different 3D models (depending on the user’s needs) on some of which (again depending on the application needs) were tested and performed simplification and size reduction processes, to make the application loading phase faster and the user experience easier and better. Another application cue was to finalize an application to relate the elements of the museum with some archaeological elements of the territory according to historical period and element type.

Digital Twins and Cultural Heritage Preservation: A Case Study of Best Practices and Reproducibility in Chiesa dei SS Apostoli e Biagio

“…Both systems are now highly portable, user-friendly and affordable. Moreover, the latest generation of hardware and software now enables polygonal rendering and low latency of the latest generation of headsets and game engines, such as Unity and Unreal Engine, and allows for the integration of the architectural elements and spaces, as well as the objects contained within for a more authentic cultural appropriation (Barrile et al, 2022).…”

Reconstrucción virtual del esquileo del marqués de Perales en El Espinar (Segovia)

“…El paulatino desarrollo e innovación de las herramientas de expresión digital en los últimos años ha permitido transmitir con una mayor eficacia y accesibilidad los aspectos morfológicos, espaciales y cualitativos de aquellos edificios e infraestructuras que han sido transformados o se encuentran arruinados y en proceso de desaparición (Pierdicca et al, 2015;Pietroni & Ferdani, 2021). Por ello, este tipo de proyectos de investigación virtual son especialmente necesarios y valorados en las sociedades actuales ya que a través de ellos se puede reconocer, difundir y tutelar el patrimonio histórico y cultural, pasado y presente, garantizando además la viabilidad y el desarrollo sostenible del ámbito rural donde se conserva una gran parte de los vestigios arqueológicos existentes (Barrile, Bernardo, Fotia, & Bilotta, 2022). Del mismo modo, estas reconstrucciones permiten establecer un debate en el ámbito científico a través de la revisión, ampliación y enriquecimiento de los trabajos publicados, favoreciendo la introducción de nuevas perspectivas y metodologías, así como la mejora en el conocimiento de este patrimonio.…”