The design of the Politecnico di Torino “Campus delle Architetture, del Design e della Pianificazione” has an enormous strategic value, both for the reorganisation of the University and for the city dynamics, contributing to the overall development of the Po cultural axis. The transformation involved by the new campus will significantly impact the life of the area, radically changing its intensity through the daily flows of thousands of people and making the park an actual natural connective tissue. The communication project includes the realisation of events aimed at presenting the Campus to disseminate and popularise the outcomes of the realisation process to different stakeholders, showing a scale model of the area. Among the innovative features of the communication proposal is the superimposition of digital layers on the physical model for audience engagement through a webAR that activates a step-by-step journey with descriptions of different aspects of the campus project.
IgrejAR: An Immersion in the Lost 16th-Century Church of Madre de Deus
This paper presents the development of IgrejAR, an augmented reality platform designed to allow museum visitors to the National Azulejo Museum to experience the memory of the lost sixteenth-century church of Madre de Deus in Lisbon, Portugal. Through the integration of historical research, laser scanning, photogrammetry, and digital modelling, we have virtually reconstructed the original church believed to have once been housed within the space of the present D. Manuel Room. Building on five years of previous virtual reconstruction research, this paper examines the latest methodologies, challenges, and outcomes involved in reconstructing the church, with particular focus on the final integration of this knowledge into an AR environment. The research aims to provide a firsthand experience of the past by synthesizing diverse historical evidence—including chronicles, paintings, contracts, and archaeological findings. It presents the first complete visualization of the church’s interior, with all its known remaining artifacts reassembled and repositioned in their original location, despite their current dispersion in other collections. By leveraging markerless AR technology and the point cloud data used to create the digital model, the IgrejAR application offers minimal disruption to the current museum experience, allowing visitors to awaken the past on top of the present.
AR Applied to the Tactile Models. Museo di Arte Orientale in Turin: Communicating the Vaulted System of Palazzo Mazzonis
In recent decades, museums, as fundamental cultural institutions of modern society, have increasingly explored innovative methods and tools for the communication and dissemination of knowledge. This process has led to significant changes in their approaches to visitor engagement. One of the most common strategies for creating interactive content in the museum field is the use of extended reality (XR) technologies and direct haptic experiences that support storytelling and interaction. By combining virtual and real environments, XR can stimulate multiple senses through the addition of digital inputs, thereby expanding the channels of knowledge transmission.
In the museum sector, however, there is still a lack of widespread and shared awareness regarding how virtual and real content should interact and how the most effective experiences for cultural transmission should be designed. The presented case study focuses on the vaulted system of the atrium of Palazzo Mazzonis in Turin, the seat of the Museum of Oriental Art, where a structured and well-tested methodology of geometric decomposition and digital reconstruction has been applied.
Augmented Reality (AR) and a digitally fabricated 3D model have been used to communicate the results of this study to a broad audience, serving different purposes ranging from research and dissemination to tourism and recreational activities.
Markerless AR Applications and 3D Printing for the Augmented Prototyping of the Franciscan Heritage of the XVIII Century
The Wooden Tabernacles research project, which began in September 2022 and is still ongoing, concerns the digitization of a series of wooden tabernacles produced between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as historical and artistic testimonies of the Capuchin order in Abruzzo.
The aim of the project is to obtain, through SfM photogrammetry, a series of geometrically accurate 3D models that can be used to create physical replicas of the surveyed objects through 3D printing technologies.
The research project also includes the implementation of an Augmented Reality (AR) application for the visualization of the mapped 3D models and other queryable information. As is well known, Augmented Reality allows digital elements to be superimposed onto a real scene; this feature generates an enhanced perception of reality by applying, through the use of specific devices, a digital information layer that modifies the real scene in order to deepen knowledge and understanding. By combining this technology with 3D printing, it becomes possible to associate a physical object with a series of informational contents that enrich its fruition and accessibility.
The Augmented Reality application will make it possible to expand the experience of using the replica by adding a series of digital information layers (photos, videos, and 3D models) that can be activated by framing the replica itself. This application has already been developed by implementing the Model Target functionalities available through the Vuforia libraries within the Unity software environment.
The 3D-printed prototype provides a physical reproduction of the object at a 1:5 scale, capable of accurately reproducing the richness of detail of the original artifact.
Digital Turris Babel. Augmented Release of Athanasius Kircher’s Archontologia
This paper presents a digital heritage project focused on Athanasius Kircher’s Turris Babel (1679), aiming to reveal and communicate the hidden visual contents enclosed within the pages of the historical book. The research develops a workflow that combines iconographic analysis, image retrieval, customized photogrammetric reconstruction, and 3D modelling to recreate the imagined architecture of the Tower of Babel and other illustrated elements such as the labyrinth. Since the tower never existed physically and survives only through engraved representations, the reconstruction process addresses the challenge of modelling an architectural fiction from a single historical source. The resulting models are integrated into a markerless augmented reality application developed with Unity and Vuforia, allowing users to navigate and explore the structures directly from the printed pages. The study demonstrates how low-cost AR tools can enhance accessibility, interpretation, and public engagement with rare books and visual cultural heritage.
Augmented Reality for the Accessibility of Architectural Archive Drawings
This paper investigates the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) as a tool for improving the accessibility, interpretation, and dissemination of architectural archive drawings. Starting from the growing digitization of archival collections, the authors explore how AR can connect traditional drawings with interactive three-dimensional reconstructions, making complex design information understandable to both specialists and general audiences. The research focuses on the unbuilt redevelopment project for the Crypta Balbi area in Rome (1984–1986) by Studio ABDR. Through source analysis, 2D redrawing, 3D modelling, and AR app development using Unity and Vuforia, the project tests static and dynamic visualization strategies that overlay digital models onto original drawings. Results show that AR can reveal spatial, structural, and contextual qualities embedded in archival documents, transforming technical drawings into accessible and engaging cultural heritage assets while supporting future uses in education, musealization, and design communication.
Using AR Illustration to Promote Heritage Sites: a Case Study
The Precettoria of Sant’Antonio di Ranverso, property of the Fondazione Ordine Mauriziano, is an extraordinary museum complex recently interested by a global effort to promote the site, an effort that since 2020 has taken a new direction.Thanks to the site’s richness in history, art, and anthropologic elements, for the second year in a row the Techniques in Visual Arts course at the Libera Accademia d’Arte Novalia was able to work on an educational and promotional project aimed at reaching a wider audience, specifically targeting the youngest visitors.To reach this objective, the course focused on exploiting the possibilities offered by augmented reality, both as a way of spreading the knowledge of the site and to address a younger audience with educa-tional content.
Between Memory and Innovation: Murals in AR for Urban Requalification in Angri (SA)
The present paper reports about a recent urban acupuncture project, Augmenting Angri, started with its first edition in 2020 and carried on in the small city of Angri (SA). The project has adopted the city of Angri to test appropriate techniques for the enhancement of local cultural heritage, ex-perimenting the attractiveness and easy access to digital content offered by recent augmented reality apps, with the aim of engaging the local population in. The project therefore falls in the field of digital humanities for the enhancement of cultural heritage through ICT but, at the same time, it is also in the field of urban art, especially street art, very popu-lar in the last two decades in Italian cities. According to a Urban acupunture approach, we combined some advanced digital representation techniques to the traditional painted street art, designing the interaction of physical murals with digital content overlapped through augmented reality.
Augmented Street Art: a Critical Contents and Application Overview
Street art is a growing phenomenon. The frequent appearance of works, projects, and events in this area reveals its increasing social and cultural role worldwide. The chance of digitizing art represents a benefit to defining cultural paths on the territory, providing an additional tool to understand and interpret it. Street art is characterized by peculiar aspects that make it unique in the artistic panorama. The democratization of contents and the physical decay of the work are two pillars. Any digitalization and communication project should consider them carefully, proposing a knowledge model respectful of the art. Augmented Reality (AR) is a representation tool that leads to achieving that delicate bal-ance between the real and the digital, enhancing the specificities of both. The authors start from the experimentation about artwork digitalization, connecting image deterioration with image recognition. Besides, they show some possible applications in Rome through a critical analysis of the domain, open-ing some future multidisciplinarity scenarios.
Scalable AR for Bim: An Application to Telecommunication Network Sites
A growing number of research works, experiments and applications is investigating the potential at the intersection of augmented reality (AR) and the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. Project management, project communication, collaborative design, maintenance and construction progress documentation, construction site safety, and training are some of the cases that can benefit from blending real and virtual views through mobile devices. In recent years, research also highlighted how mixed reality and building information modeling (BIM) could cooperate to provide effective communication between multiple agents and closer interaction between digital information and the building site. Nevertheless, consolidated applications in these fields are still limited, especially when compared to other areas of AR adoption. This paper presents the development of an AR-based mobile app for exploring telecommunications tower sites and interacting with a related BIM database. The project aims to provide easy-to-use tools to maintain both the physical assets and an up-to-date model. We discuss critical issues in developing a scalable and interoperable application, supporting the feasibility study of similar solutions in the AEC sector.