Virtual immersive environments for underwater archaeological exploration

In this paper we describe a system designed for the fruition of underwater archaeological sites. It is under development in the ARROWS project (end August 2015, funded by the European Commission), along with other advanced technologies and tools for mapping, diagnosing, cleaning, and securing underwater and coastal archaeological sites. The main objective is to make easier the management of the heterogeneous set of data available for each underwater archaeological site (archival and historical data, 3D measurements, images, videos, sonograms, georeference, texture and shape of artefacts, others). All the data will be represented in a 3D interactive and informative scene, making the archaeological site accessible to experts (for research purposes, e.g. classification of artefacts by template matching) and to the general public (for dissemination of the underwater cultural heritage).