Virtual Reality for the Exploitation of Houses and Historical Gardens. The Example of Villa Arconati

The virtualisation project of Villa Arconati is part of the process involved in organising the aristocratic houses north of Milan. The project aims to test the use of virtual reality as an instrument of exploitation and multi-platform visualisation for villas and historic gardens. This paper describes the methodology utilised which allows us to create clear models of architectural and vegetation elements that will be contributing towards the final model: a successful compromise between realism and easy visualisation. While the modelling of the architectural components has followed a well defined process, as far as the garden is concerned, the development of the project presented greater problems since the methodology requires an hybrid approach between traditional software for garden design and representation and modelling activities for all the parts of gardens that require mankind intervention such as continuous shape pruning. The historical reconstruction of the house might therefore turn out to be a good basis for providing tourists and visitors with new instruments for learning and understanding, even using experiences in augmented reality, and may also offer planners further means to evaluate projects and support them in the decisionmaking process.