Digital Mont'e Prama: 3D cultural heritage presentations in museums and anywhere

We present an interactive visualization system developed for the valorization of an extraordinary collection of protostoric Mediterranean sculptures, which depict models of buildings (cone-shaped stone towers), as well as larger-than-life human figures. The architecture is based on scalable components for efficient distribution and adaptive rendering of extremely detailed surface meshes, as well as a simple and effective interactive camera controller tailored for touch interaction. The user interface has been designed for targeting both small screens and large display systems, and in a way that casual users can easily and naturally explore the models with fast learning curves. Furthermore, a thumbnail-based point-of-interest selector enable users to explore 3D views with information presented as 2D overlays decorating the 3D scene. The system components have been integrated in different interactive applications, ranging from large-screen museal setups and low end mobile devices both with very high visual quality. The capabilities of the museal systems have been demonstrated in a variety of temporal and permanent exhibitions, where they have been extensively used by tens of thousands of visitors.

@InProceedings{BABMG15,
  author       = {Balsa Rodriguez, M. and Agus, M. and Bettio, F. and Marton, F. and Gobbetti, E.},
  title        = {Digital Mont'e Prama: 3D cultural heritage presentations in museums and anywhere},
  booktitle    = {Proc. Digital Heritage},
  year         = {2015},
  note         = {Award: best paper},
  keywords     = {massive model rendering, mobile rendering},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2015/BABMG15},
}