Browsing in the virtual museum of the sarcophagi in the Basilica of St. Silvestro at the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome

Abstract

This paper outlines a program (ISEE) to visualise interactive 3D environments and access information through the Web. ISEE had been prototyped as content management tool with Internet Explorer since 2008 and currently supports the major browsers. Its database of information is stored in MySQL. The basic idea of the software is to enable information retrieval by simply looking inside a 3D environment, since moving and looking in the real world are basic interactions, which all viewers use. It ranks the relevant information by means of its position/orientation of the viewer in 3D space. The ranking algorithm that we developed matches the intuitive expectation of users as verified by means of formal usability tests. We present its application in the project in progress for the Museum of the sculpture in the Basilica of St. Silvestro at the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome, where the user will be able to retrieve information through the virtual visit and using QR-code in situ for each fragment of sarcophagi. An important aspect with internet usage is the optimisation of the 3D model. This has been achieved creating a low poly 3D mesh with the application of normal and displacement maps generated with a baking process of the high poly 3D model. In this way we have optimized for the Web and the interactive use. To reduce the chromatic aberration a massive photographic campaign was used to texturize the 3D model through a camera matching process. The result is a low poly 3D model fully texturized ready to use and imported in many 3D viewers. Normally we use the Unity 3D technology (http://unity3d.com) to visualize and interactively navigate 3D models. The Unity plug-in is available for all the major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari) and platforms (Windows, OsX). Our interdisciplinary collaboration is a contribute to try an innovative solution for the accessing and managing the information in its context. © 2012 IEEE.