Discovering patere in Venice: an Augmented Reality project for Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that allows users to perceive the world in an enhanced way; it improves the users’ experience by overlaying computer-generated information to the real environment. Is one of the most up-to-date and advanced areas of technology and it has been applied to several domains since the 1990s. In the beginning it was mostly employed for medical, military, and industrial purposes, but it lately became very useful for the management and preservation of Cultural Heritage (CH). This application of AR will be the focus of this dissertation and the digital project carried on and described. There are some main purposes for which AR is used in CH: improving visitor experience, reconstruction, exploration, but also preservation and bringing to life past events. Once Cultural Heritage has been digitized, it is possible for everyone to access to it, both by experts and non-experts. This is the goal of the digital project described in this dissertation: an augmented tour of some of the most important patere in Venice. Patera is a circular bas-relief, usually in Istrian stone or marble, in vogue in Venice from the end of XII to the end of XIII century. It was a typical architectural element in the venetian lagoon, it was considered ornamental but, as it will be pointed out, it has an astronomical meaning. The AR project on patere will therefore make the user not only discover a new aspect of Venice’s Cultural Heritage, but also experience it in an enhanced and more interactive way, thanks to the use of Augmented Reality, particularly of Wikitude. The process of ideation, collection of the material, and prototyping of the project will be outlined in this dissertation, as the initial phase of a wider project that will be further improved and developed.