Carving time and space: A mutual stimulation of IT and archaeology to craft multidimensional VR data-inspection

Abstract

Interactive inspection of semantically-enriched Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) is designed on top of complex hierarchies combining both semantic and rendering aspects. Within Cultural Heritage, multi-dimensional IVEs represent a common solution in order to understand, query and inspect virtual reconstructions across different time-spans. The contribution presents innovative experiments about how the digital heritage record is organized and represented. Such approaches fit several scientific requirements within the Cultural Heritage domain as the annotation of the sources employed and the reasoning that are behind a reconstructive hypothesis. The methodological implications on the use of IT approaches can improve both the quality of the user fruition and the scientific content, offering, at the same time, formalisms and tools to boost the scientific research with real-time immersive representation of complex CH record. Graph-databases are already employed in such contexts since they represent one of the best solutions to address complex and dynamic relationships in highly connected datasets, also in terms of performance and scalability. A set of formalisms and replicable models for immersive inspection will be presented and discussed, addressing their interplay with a graph-based formalism specifically designed for 3D hypothesis creation and visualization in Cultural Heritage (CH) domain, targeting multitemporal scenarios - namely the Extended Matrix (EM).