Articles by Eva Pietroni

The paper presents some of the work performed by the VH Lab of CNR-ITABC team in the last ten years, by analyzing the state of the art of video making for Cultural Heritage. Today it is possible to obtain high quality movies on low budgets. Moreover, scholars have the advantage, in comparison to the movie industry, of the easy availability of a large number of highly skilled specialists with specific expertise and know-how. New tools and methods now available are shaping innovative creative languages and will lead to new types of jobs and working opportunities.

Etruscanning is a European project (Culture 2007) whose aim is to re-create and restore the original context of Etruscan graves. The main objectives are: digital acquisition, digital restoration, 3D representation and implementation of innovative VR environments related to Etruscan tombs and collections in European and Italian Museums. We focused on the Regolini-Galassi tomb in the Sorbo necropolis in Cerveteri, one of the most remarkable Etruscan graves. It was discovered still intact in 1836 and is famous not only for its rich contents but also for the objects showing the Orientalising influence. The finds from this tomb are kept in the Gregorian Etruscan Museum in the Vatican Museums and the empty grave at the site is not always open to public. By making 3D reconstructions of the tomb and the objects we can re-create the archaeological context of this Etruscan tomb. As the process of virtual reconstruction of the Regolini-Galassi tomb tries to visualize it at the moment it was closed, we needed to recompose the original placement of the objects and their ancient appearance. This was not easy as we had to reconsider some contradictory historical plans and iconographies (Grifi, Canina, etc.) and to answer some dif??cult questions. The Regolini-Galassi tomb was implemented in a VR environment and a permanent instal¬lation was presented in the Vatican Museums in April 2013. A key aspect is the development of natural interaction interfaces: visitors use body movements to explore the 3D space and to access contents without the need for any traditional interface. This solution not only makes the experience more engaging but also allows people of every level of skill to enjoy and learn. This embodiment constitutes a new frontier in the communication and learning processes and we believe that it represents a crucial element in museums.

The Tiber Valley Project aims to create a series of digital applications for 3D reconstructing, visualization and real time browsing of the ancient and current Tiber Valley landscape (particularly for the Villa dei Volusii and Lucus Feroniae areas), in four different historical phases. In this perspective, the first problem to face is the need for a valid methodology for ancient landscape ecosystem reconstruction, before dealing with monuments and building. On the basis of an intense multi-disciplinary discussion and the previous VH Lab experience in this field, in this article we are presenting a scheme for a standardized reconstruction procedure, where the landscape is built using all available sources and elevation data obtained by a photogrammetry process on historical pictures. Ecosystem areas are then calculated through GIS elaboration in GRASS-GIS environment, through a procedure which may be shared for any situation of historical landscape reconstruction, allowing the matching and the mathematical processing of geographical data aimed to the definition of different ecological areas (both in terms of natural vegetation and cultivated lands). Maps are then created to be imported in procedural landscape generation engines: the last part of the paper focuses on the lack of effective open source software in this field, and a possible proposal implementation in this sense.

The FIRB project, “Integrated Technologies of robotics and virtual environment in archaeology”, gives us the opportunity to experiment and create a multi-user domain on the web aimed at a multidisciplinary scientific community. The state of the art in this field is still in a pioneering stage because there are very few multi-user domains for sharing and exchanging cultural and scientific contents in the field of virtual heritage. The multiuser virtual environment is conceived as an open laboratory: a place where it is possible to compare the construction and validation of interpretative processes, to investigate new relations among data in space and time.