The VeNiss Infrastructure: A Virtual Environment to Navigate the Venetian Lagoon Through Space and Time

Venice’s Nissology (VeNiss) is a multi-institution research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC), involving the universities of Padua, Florence, and Harvard. Its goal is to represent the architectural heritage of Venice’s lagoon through an interactive 3D web map, allowing users to explore the historic archipelago via a digital platform. Nowadays, this environment faces severe neglect, and many ancient settlements have largely disappeared. The VeNiss project retraces the history of these places over the past five hundred years, shedding light on the events that have shaped around thirty of the more than sixty islands that, over the centuries, have gradually lost their connection to the city centre. The creation of this semantic infrastructure on urban history is based on a complex, integrated process involving a diverse group of scholars, including architectural and art historians, as well as experts in digital surveying, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Building Information Modeling (BIM). This contribution describes the main steps used to produce three-dimensional models of the lagoon settlements and highlights the progressive integration of VR visualisation to ensure optimal collaboration among team members during the design and validation processes of BIM models.