Cloud computing and augmented reality for cultural heritage

Abstract

In this paper the use of augmented reality and cloud computing technology to enrich the scenes of sites with a relevant cultural interest is proposed. The main goal is to develop a mobile application to improve the user’s cultural experience during the sightseeing of a city of art through the integration of digital contents related to specific sites or historic monuments. The mobile application has been developed exploiting the Wikitude SDK software library. The huge amount of cultural digital contents (mainly represented by images) justifies the exploitation of a cloud-computing environment to obtain a multi-platform solution. In particular, we have chosen the KVM and OpenNebula as cloud platform technologies to build a private cloud environment, since they exhibit great features like openness, accessibility, simplicity and scalability. The work has been validated through test beds realized both in laboratory, using images captured from PC display, and in a real environment.