Abstract
Abstract. During the last years, many solutions have been proposed for 3D Virtual Heritage representations. Recently, also new technologies for online gaming evolved, based on javascript libraries (WebGL), used to create and publish virtual interactive environments. They are based on recent Web browser’s functionalities, surpassing some limitations of VRML technologies. On the side of geospatial information, technology has evolved from desktop GIS to 2D WebGIS and globe applications. The use of globe applications is, today, very diffused due to its immediate and at the same time impressive representation of the earth surface and territories. These technologies have been, also, applied to Virtual Heritage 3D reconstructions, to improve the fruition of Cultural Heritage (CH), with the achievement of interesting results. The topic of this paper is the experimentation on the fusion between globe based and gaming technologies (in our case WebGL) that allow achieving a more user-centric and powerful solution useful for publishing 3D geospatial information of CH on Web. This choice allows obtaining GIS oriented 3D models, typical of globe applications, and, at the same time, a more immersive exploration of CH and its surrounding environment. In particular, it also gives complementary text and multimedia information on the history, architectural features of each cultural good, based on querying of semantic information. The test field of the research is the construction of the 3D GIS virtual globe model of the Manfredonic Castle of Mussomeli (Sicily-Italy), developed for PON-NEPTIS EU Project, to compare open-source technologies and commercial proprietary applications.
Highlights
In recent times, new needs of for the dissemination of knowledge on Web have grown up
A strong contribution in this sense has been given by rapid 3D photogrammetry restitution methods, such as Structure For Motion (SFM), that recreates a probabilistic distribution of the structure through an iteration step by step (Dellaert et al 1999)
In light of what discussed before, the solutions presented in this paper show different options of 3D Virtual Heritage (VH) models created merging Web technologies, gaming technologies and GIS Globe applications, to build a better human-centred solution for VH
Summary
New needs of for the dissemination of knowledge on Web have grown up. This solution has been very useful for sharing online the information regarding contents of museums (Pescarin, 2014), and was interesting enough, but did not take full advantage of the WebGL technologies potential, that has evolved over the last few years These technologies give the possibility to visualise virtual 3D model on Web and to recreate virtual complex 3D environments and to navigate inside them, obtaining additional context-aware information. The virtual Globe choice provides a multi-dimensional GIS, based on a 3D virtual globe representation with the addition of the digital terrain model (DTM), that consists on the digital representation of the earth's surface on the ground (Pirotti et al, 2017) This technology offers a very user-friendly solution because the 3D terrain representation inserted into a geographic information system allows direct and simple access to information and the comprehension of the geomorphology of the territory. The future development and implementation of 3D GIS applications are certainly based on Globe solutions
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