Augmented reality for archaeological finds

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) has become a suitable solution for visualization purposes in several applications such as gaming, entertainment or simple visualization. In contrast, only very few applications considers the use of AR for professional and scientific purposes as their use must be adapted to different applications and specific goals. In this paper, the use of Augmented Reality is applied to archaeological objects visualization. An ad hoc cube device and a 3D Studio Max plug-in have been realized for automatically process 3D complex objects models and visualize them with AR open source software. The developed methodology is described in detail and tests on real archaeological objects are reported and commented. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.