Virtual environment as a tool to access the marine abysses

This paper describes a virtual environment designed and developed aiming at increasing the fruition of underwater exploration. Such system is under development in the frame of ARROWS project (end August 2015, funded by the European Commission). Main objectives of ARROWS project are the development and integration of advanced technologies and tools for mapping, diagnosing, cleaning, and securing underwater and coastal archaeological sites. Along with it, an informative system, that has the role to make easier the management of the heterogeneous set of data available (such as archival and historical data; georeferenced images, sonograms, videos; texture and shape of artefacts; others), is in development. The virtual environment aims at representing all the available data in a 3D interactive and informative scene. In this way, the archaeological site is accessible both 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). Due to the high educational value of this system, it has been enriched by dedicated functionalities for the management and representation of biological information, which was beyond the original project scopes.