From Optical Acquisition to Rapid Prototyping: Applications to Medicine and to Cultural Heritage

Abstract. The case study, faced in this paper, arises in the context of Interreg Italia-Malta European project named I-Access, dedicated to the improvement of accessibility to Cultural Heritage (CH). Accessibility considered not only as the demolition of physical architectural barriers, but also as the possibility of fruition of CH through technological tools that can increase its perception and knowledge. Last achievements in photogrammetry and terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) technology offered new methods of data acquisition in the field of CH, giving the possibility of monitoring and processing big data, in the form of point clouds. Ever in this field, reverse engineering techniques and computer graphics are even more used for involving visitors to discover CH, with navigation into 3D reconstructions, empowering the real visualization adding further 3D information through the Augmented Reality (AR). At the same time, recent advances on rapid prototyping technologies grant the automated 3D printing of scaled 3D model reconstructions of real CH elements allowing the tactile fruition of visitors that suffer from visual defects and the connection with 3D AR visualizations. The presented work shows how these technologies could revive an historical square, the Piazza Garraffo in Palermo (Italy), with the virtual insertion of its baroque fountain, originally placed there. The final products of this work are an indoor and an outdoor AR mobile application, that allow the visualization of the historical original asset of the square. This study case shows how the mixing of AR and the rapid prototyping technologies could be useful for the improvement of the fruition of CH. This work could be considered a multidisciplinary experimentation, where different technologies, today still in development, contribute to the same goal aimed at improving the accessibility of the monument for enhancing the fruition of CH.

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RAPID PROTOTYPING FOR THE EXTENSION OF THE ACCESSIBILITY TO CULTURAL HERITAGE FOR BLIND PEOPLE

ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ◽

10.5194/isprs-archives-xlii-2-w15-1077-2019 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol XLII-2/W15 ◽

pp. 1077-1082 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

A. Scianna ◽

F. Di Filippo

Keyword(s):

Rapid Prototyping ◽

Cultural Heritage ◽

Visually Impaired ◽

Low Cost ◽

3D Models ◽

Disabled People ◽

Blind And Visually Impaired ◽

Visually Impaired People ◽

Impaired People ◽

Problems And Solutions

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The extension of accessibility of CH to disabled people is a current topic of great importance. Today, there exist a lot of ongoing projects aimed at the extension of accessibility using the most recent and low cost technologies to improve accessibility to CH. One of the technologies, today available that can help to improve accessibility to CH, is certainly rapid prototyping. The main goal of the research here illustrated is the application of rapid prototyping for the extension of accessibility of Cultural Heritage (CH) to blind and visually impaired people. This document reports an experiment that compared the effectiveness of different 3D models for the introduction of blind and visually impaired people to the tactile use of models of monuments. In addition, this study focuses on defining standards and guidelines regarding features of 3D models, e.g. print resolution, in order to obtain greater legibility of models at different scales by the blind or visually impaired people. This paper shows a part of a wider Interreg EU research project, named I-ACCESS, aimed to study accessibility problems and solutions for CH. The experiments conducted with the sample of disabled people, allowed to obtain results on the most suitable printing parameters to be used.</p>

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