Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Virtual museums are becoming increasingly popular, especially thanks to the recent spread of low-cost immersive technologies enabling a richer technology-based cultural offer. However, creating a virtual museum commonly requires a lot of effort, especially if a certain visual quality is required.

The aim of the project described in this paper is to verify the effectiveness of automatic strategies to create a virtual museum of paintings, whose digital images are retrieved directly from repositories freely available in the network based on specific user queries. The same approach is then applied in order to create an augmented reality application transforming any environment, purposely instrumented with markers, in a virtual museum.

The site of the ‘Balsignano village’ in Modugno (Italy), for some years has been the object of attention by scholars. Recently renovated, its valuation is nowadays the main objective for that Municipality. The aim of this article is describing our approach in integrating digital data, virtual tours and 3d models of the village elements to produce an interactive tool available on the internet, stimulating the desire to physically visit the settings. Our findings can be generalized to any context in which a link between a website and a physical site represent a challenge for low-budgeted Administrations.

It is becoming popular to render art exhibitions in Virtual Reality (VR). Many of these are used to deliver at-home experiences on peoples’ own mobile devices, however, control options on mobile VR systems are necessarily less flexible than those of situated VR fixtures. In this paper, we present a study that explores aspects of control in such VR exhibitions - specifically comparing ‘on rails’ movement with ‘free’ movement. We also expand the concept of museum audio guides to better suit the VR medium, exploring the possibility of embodied character-guides. We compare these controllable guides with a more traditional audio-guide. The study uses interviews to explore users’ experience qualitatively, as well as questionnaires addressing both user experience and simulator sickness. The results suggest that users generally prefer to have control over both their movement and the guide, however, if relinquishing movement control, they prefer the uncontrolled guide. The paper presents three key findings: (1) users prefer to be able to directly control their movement; (2) this does not make a notable difference to simulator sickness; (3) embodied guides are potentially a good way to deliver additional information in VR exhibition settings.

The semantic web and open data paradigms are gaining momentum in recent years and more information is being published online following the linked data principles. This enables easy access and processing of data by external services. An example of such services are intelligent conversational agents that provide to the users the ability to interact with a computer system in natural language. Such communication is much more intuitive and facilitates the use of complex services to less skilled users (e.g., elderly) or users with disabilities (e.g., visually impaired) thus providing to these groups access to the huge amount of information stored in the semantic web or specific online services. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept conversational agent able to provide information about the European cultural heritage and display stored digital content from the Europeana database.

The paper aims to explore new methods of re-contextualization of artworks in their original settings, based on 3D reconstruction and 3D Web, through a case-study. It concerns a cycle of Medieval frescoes, detached from the walls of a monastery in Umbria, Central Italy, altered by numerous and some very recent renovations. At the present, the fragments of the cycle of frescoes are preserved in various museums, mostly in the United States.

How to restore a painting when physical and chemical alteration of the painted layer has not yet reached a final stage and is partly caused by unknown ageing processes? Can we make a painting look restored without any physical intervention on it? We encountered this problem in the course of conservation treatment of paintings of the famous Serbian Cubistic and Informalist painter Lazar Vozarević. In the period of 2015–2017, the “Lazar Vozarević” Gallery, based in Sremska Mitrovica, carried out a large project of conservation and restoration of Vozarević’s paintings from different periods. The conservation and restoration treatment was successfully carried out on all paintings but one, a painting from his Informal period, entitled “Untitled” (1961). Due to its physical deterioration, the painting could not be successfully restored using conventional well-established methods. We came to a decision to propose a virtual restoration treatment which would be conducted in a mixed reality environment. In strictly controlled light condition, an exact virtual retouch would be projected onto the canvas, so that the result would be a unique installation, which would emphasize and unify both the original painting and its virtual counterpart.

Most of the maps in tourist information websites show only the position of the Points of Interest (PoIs)—providing sometime a link to a webpage—making choices difficult. Multimedia maps, instead, could support users in satisfying the traveler needs giving links to information about the PoIs. The developed application supports improved connections between documents and the places they refer to because the user could select PoIs to visit through previews of its multimedia documents. PoIs could also be filtered through their categories and types, accessibility status and time line, thus improving the system usability. This article describes a multimedia map developed as sample for the Lipari Island, the largest of the Aeolian Islands (in Sicily), inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Virtual assistants and similar software tools are gaining importance among phone and computer users. The most well-known assistants (Siri, Cortana, Google, etc.) provide general information to users and cannot be adapted to specific needs. Custom implementations usually cover specific domains and are specialized to provide a comprehensive set of information or functionalities from that area. Currently, there is a lack of general applications for cultural heritage, since most implementations are specialized virtual guides for museums or exhibitions. We present an overview of virtual assistants that we developed and are applied to the area of cultural and natural heritage, where we try to improve the current shortage of tools. The presented prototypes provide various functionalities to users and can help them to discover, learn and plan visits to cultural sights.