Abstract
The knowledge-intensive society paradigm fosters relationships between technology and human actors with data, values, and knowledge that become mutual drivers for social innovation. The cultural heritage sector is naturally influenced by this vision, and museums and cultural institutions have a prominent role in dissemination of cultural values. This chapter focuses on a method developed to combine the power of the computer visualization technology with the cultural elements spread across collections, introducing some notes and remarks on how digital replicas of drawings, manuscripts, and museum objects can be successfully employed to spread knowledge. Through a custom application called ISLe, aimed at visualizing 3D models that accurately replicate the original items, some experiences in the production of digital replicas are introduced, highlighting opportunities and criticalities to be considered in the adoption of technology that can be potentially shared and exploited by many possible figures involved in cultural heritage.
TopIntroduction
Over the last decades many digital technologies bound to the cultural dissemination improved, leading to brand new ways to make information accessible at different levels, enhancing how it can be shared among interested people. Key concepts like dynamic web applications (i.e., Web 2.0), eXtended and Augmented Reality (XR and AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), virtual space and metaverse represent today intertwined terms, often combined to explain how technical expertise can be useful to share cross-sectional knowledge (Tenenbaum, 2006). However, this scenario is frequently too technology-centered, with most of the relevance dedicated to the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) rather than to the cultural values they can convey. The many possible implications of themes belonging to tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage (CH), for example, have been more and more influenced by recent digital platforms and data schemes, often developed to shift the attention of users from the computer application per se to the extended fruition of the knowledge it can trigger. What was still not enough pervasive in the information society (the so-called Society 4.0), becomes now largely considered in a context where, in the words of Deguchi et al. (2020), relationships between technology and society contribute to describe a knowledge-intensive society, in which data, information, and knowledge are mutual drivers for social innovation, as the Society 5.0 paradigm suggests (Fukuyama, 2018).
Following these premises, this chapter introduces the visualization outcomes of a more general and complete workflow, meant to produce a system able to replace, investigate, describe and communicate Cultural Heritage objects; these goals are reached through the generation of digital communicative artefacts, dedicated to fine drawings, objects belonging to museum collections and ancient manuscripts, following a research path that started more than ten years ago. The working pipeline that will be presented, travelling through the Society 5.0 model, follows a basic scheme made of data collected from the real world and processed by computer applications; it leads to output results applied back to the real world for an extended fruition by many different human users, though a custom visualization interface at the core of this chapter discussion. These processes are rooted on the assumption that all the elements that were investigated, even with apparently flat geometry, are actually 3D objects with specific behaviors in terms of color, light reflectance and shape.
With particular care to visitors in museums, art historians, scholars, conservators and restorers, who rely more and more on digital applications meant to visually explore and understand the characteristics of surfaces and materials belonging to many kinds of objects, a novel process to replicate and exhibit CH artefacts is detailed here with a focus on visualization purposes, whose main fruition directives are realism, requiring accurate shapes and surfaces representation, and responsiveness, since models have to change their appearance when directly manipulated by observers in museums or laboratories. The visualization framework evolved to display artefacts including a wide set of different features, from diverse materials to complex fabrication or drawing techniques and tools usages. Beginning from some experimentation on ancient drawings, in which the third dimension was reasonably less perceptible than the whole surface, the proposed system later proved its versatility in managing digital replicas originated from many input sources, surrogating the user experience on real 3D objects. More in general, this contribution focuses on this interactive manipulation, illustrating the paradigms and technical features behind the platform authored by the research team who introduced it, its methodological approach based on a consolidated scientific foundation and the final interface targeted to users with heterogeneous ergonomic needs.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Shader: A shader is a computer application that analytically simulates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene. It is used to faithfully replicate materials and surfaces in digital visualization.
Digital Replica: A digital replica is a faithful copy of an original artifact in the digital domain, including its appearance, its morphology and how it is meant to interact with possible users.
Real-Time Rendering: In computer graphics, Real-Time Rendering (RTR) is a specific visualization pipeline that consists of three conceptual stages: the application stage, the geometry stage, and the rasterizing stage. The outcome of this pipeline is an interactive visual representation of a scene, which
Cultural Heritage: The cultural heritage (CH) is the legacy of assets of a society that is inherited from past generations. It includes tangible culture (such as monuments, books, works of art, artifacts, etc.), intangible culture (such as traditions, language, and knowledge), and natural heritage (including culturally significant landscapes, and biodiversity).
Total Appearance: A 3D solution feature in which the digital reproduction of the visual properties of a surface is a faithful transposition of the physical properties of the replicated object through a process that covers the mathematical validation of the properties of the surface, an accurate simulation of light reflections and a perceptual final image corrected for the human eye.
LED: A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor light source that emits light when current flows through it. In order to replicate in the digital domain light behaviors, LED lights are often used to digitize CH collections in museums, as they are less dangerous than other illuminants.
Photometric Stereo: In computer vision, photometric stereo is a technique used to get an accurate estimation of a surface’s normals by observing the object under different lighting conditions, since light reflected by a surface is dependent on the orientation of it in relation to the light source.