The Battle of Cannae: towards a model of immersive visits through massive use of character animation

The Battle of Cannae took place near the Ofanto River in Puglia and was the biggest battle of the Second Punic War. As a result of the events connected to it, Rome could become an imperial republic, master of the ecumene, or the known world of the time, or give in to the dominion of Carthage forever. At the dawn of August 2, 216 BC Hannibal gained an overwhelming victory, but the final outcome of the war, as is well known, ended definitively with the victory of the Romans under the guidance of Publius Cornelius Scipio at Zama in 202 BC. Rome thus gained control of the entire western basin of the Mediterranean, which would have decisive political, social, and economic repercussions that would be fundamental for the fate of not only the future empire, but also of the peoples overlooking the Mare Nostrum. The Battle of Cannae is recognized as "the battle par excellence", the war strategy made it into schools, studied by militaries of all time periods, but is described by many with significant differences in interpretation. So within a renovated Antiquarium, the direct study of the sources is combined with the use of technologies of representation and communication to offer new visitors the opportunity to musealize those events, the protagonists, and the political and social conditions in context. With the new exhibition, the museum opens up to a more dynamic and participatory vision of the public, attempting to become a cultural attraction capable of triggering virtuous processes of knowledge transfer thanks to the potential of new digital languages. The development of immersive content merged into the movie Apud Cannas, combined with thematic in-depth analysis on touch-screens provides diversified content for a heterogeneous public, which includes specialists, history experts and a "general public", who has low knowledge of the history of Cannae. In this project, the approach of a simplified user-experience, useful for audience with low confidence with technologies, contrasts with the content created with the most innovative technologies for museum communication.