Interactive Environments in Cultural Heritage. Interiors and construction of San Francesco church in Bologna

Information and communication technology are widely impacting the pipeline of restoring, renovating, protecting, documenting and archiving our cultural heritage. The exploration of the possibilities of digital preservation is a valuable resource for researches in the field of cultural heritage, exploring the integration of cultural heritage and technology in relation to data-capture, digitization, architectural computing, reconstruction, modelling, information data-processing, virtual reality applications, standardization, data visualization and archiving. The research’s main scope is to provide a bridge of visual and interactive environment between analisys, documentation and preservation of monuments through the enhancement of visual data and the integration of 3d data capture and modeling within an image-based gis. Strategy of valorization, such as explanation of the value of heritage, consists of the mapping of these values: 3D modeling, representation and multimedia. Representation becomes a mean for structured knowledge proposing “interpretative models” for the analysis and representation of historical, cultural, aesthetic and environmental significance of cultural heritage and of its tangible and intangible issues. The research proposes an integrated approach based upon a combination of different 3D measurement techniques for the virtual reconstruction of complex architectures and panoramic pictures as layers for heritage contents and features. Since no established procedure has been available to model and visualize this type of architectures, the project addresses a selection of topics and contributions: an effective pipeline for 3D documentation, emboding a cultural approach for the restoration of interiors and vaulted surfaces with different levels of automation, integration of 3D models and GIS data, and developing visualization tools based on vectorial and raster models. The research is still developing its scopes, in particular it aims to increase the integration of different capturing devices and to develop techniques to apply the methodologies of Information System to cultural heritage. The final documentation tool is a visual and interactive environment to collect and provide qualitative and quantitative information to the user and suitable for many purposes such as documentation to track changes for future interventions, enhancing remote fruition and awareness about the monument.