Andrea BRAGHIROLI
(Dipartimento di Architettura, Italy)
Keywords: digital survey, laser scanner, 3D modelling, museum, virtual model
Abstract:
The subject of the project is a remarkable collection of ancient fragments currently located in a courtyard of the Archeological Museum in Florence. The site includes fragments from many different areas of the city at the age of the Roman empire. Nevertheless its unique archeological value, currently the courtyard cannot be visited, because it would require too much effort for the museum to make it accessible. The objective of the research is to make the entire collection available for virtual visiting trough a digital model, both in an online and offline scenario.
A laser scan survey was already available from an extensive survey of the whole area, but the resulting pointcloud data was too big to be easily managed and converted to a 3D model suitable for real time rendering.
For this reason I focused on a small portion of the courtyard, a small temple shaped artifact cmade of fragments from the ancient Isis temple. A photographic survey was made with non professional equipment, in order to keep the entire workflow simple and extensible to the whole courtyard.
Then all the photos were processed by two different softwares, then the resulting 3D meshes were compared to the original pointcloud in order to check reliability and integrity of the 3D model.
The more accurate model was then refined and optimized for real time render, decreasing the faces count and including extra detail in the texture data.
I designed a online interface, that could easily allow virtual visit trough a website, displaying extra information about each fragment. Also a more detailed model was set for an offline scenario (a kiosk placed inside the museum), using a powerful realtime render engine usually designed available for video games.
This approach can be easily extended to the whole site in a low cost survey scenario.