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.
Combining on-site and off-site analysis: towards a new paradigm for cultural heritage surveys
In recent decades, cultural heritage survey practices have significantly evolved due to the increasing use of digitization tools providing quick and easy access to faithful copies of study objects. While these digital data have clear advantages, especially in terms of geometric characterization, they also introduce a paradigm shift by outsourcing ex situ most of the analysis activities. This break between real and virtual working environments now raises new issues, both in terms of data dispersion and knowledge correlation in multidisciplinary teams. Benefiting from the fields of information systems and augmented reality, we proposed an integrated approach allowing the fusion of geometric, visual and semantic features in a single platform. Today, this proof of concept leads to new perspectives for the production of semantically enriched digital data. In this paper, we intend to explore the different possibilities in terms of implementation and their benefits for cultural heritage survey.
AR in the Architecture Domain: State of the Art
Augmented reality (AR) allows the real and digital worlds to converge and overlap in a new way of observation and understanding. The architectural field can significantly benefit from AR applications, due to their systemic complexity in terms of knowledge and process management. Global interest and many research challenges are focused on this field, thanks to the conjunction of technological and algorithmic developments from one side, and the massive digitization of built data. A significant quantity of research in the AEC and educational fields describes this state of the art. Moreover, it is a very fragmented domain, in which specific advances or case studies are often described without considering the complexity of the whole development process. The article illustrates the entire AR pipeline development in architecture, from the conceptual phase to its application, highlighting each step’s specific aspects. This storytelling aims to provide a general overview to a non-expert, deepening the topic and stimulating a democratization process. The aware and extended use of AR in multiple areas of application can lead a new way forward for environmental understanding, bridging the gap between real and virtual space in an innovative perception of architecture.