Augmented Reality for Structural Inspection of Historic Monuments: The Case of Lausanne Cathedral

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) has been increasingly adopted in different fields of science, engineering and medicine as a tool to empower human interaction with visual data and guide precise interactions with the real world. This paper presents a pioneering use of augmented reality to inspect historic monuments. These form an important part of the world’s cultural heritage and require continuous inspection and maintenance, often executed by interdisciplinary teams and throughout extended time frames. A digital model of 13th-century Lausanne Cathedral is developed to guide and improve inspection activities, focusing on determining its structural behaviour and highlighting related vulnerabilities. Thereby, augmented reality enables a global, interactive visualization of the building information, guiding expert work in the monument and easing collaboration among different disciplines. Future applications and extensions to other historic monuments and disciplines have broad potential to upscale inspections of cultural heritage buildings.