The Virtual Museum of Landscape

In this paper the authors present the approach in the study and reconstruction of archaeological landscapes that has characterized their work carried out at CINECA Supercomputing Center of Bologna, in the Visualization lab (VISIT lab), and in the Institute of Technologies Applied to Cultural Heritage of CNR (CNR-ITABC). The digital pipeline defined in these years of work has lead to the reconstruction of actual landscape (and archaeological landscape is part of our contemporaneity), past landscape, and ecosystems. The presented methodological model is a relational model that uses both bottom-up (data processing from fieldwork with integrated technologies) and top-down (landscape reconstruction through conceptual models, comparative analysis and mental maps) approaches. Landscape virtual museums can be built as ecosystems made of models and dynamic behaviors, where data can be read in a transparent way because of their association with a visible ontology. The proposed digital protocol is defined by procedures, tools (hardware and software), exchangeable data/formats and technologies such as GIS, OpenGL graphic libraries, terrain generators, Open Source software. It integrates 2D spaces and 3D, raster and vector, grid and polygonal models, text and multimedia, with the goal of offering a real time access to cultural and environmental information through off-line and on-line Virtual Reality applications and, in the future, virtual communities that could share experiences in and of the same spatial 3D landscape-mindscape.