"Esquina multimedia". Museum exhibition for the visualization of Chan Chan archaeological site

Chan Chan is a wide archaeological site, located in Peru. Its knowledge is entrusted to the visit of Palacio Tschudi, the only restored up to now, whilst the majority of the site remains unknown to the visitors. The reasons are manifold. The site is very large and difficult to visit. Some well-conserved architectures, like Huaca Arco Iris, are very far from the core centre of the site. Furthermore, heavy factors of decay are present, mainly caused by illegal excavations, by marine salt and by the sometime devastating phenomenon of the Ninõ. For these reasons, the majority of the decorative elements are covered due to conservation issues. Finally, the vastness of the buildings makes difficult to understand their real value, also with a direct visit of the site. To overcome the aforesaid problems, we designed, developed and realized the museum exhibition presented in this paper. We named the installation "Esquina Multimedia", where every corner is aimed to solve a specific problem, providing the tourists with interactive and enjoyable applications. The virtual tour allows reaching also the unreachable areas. An Augmented Reality application has been developed in order to discover ancient artefacts, invisible because covered by the earth. A web-browser has been specifically designed to show bas-relieves, with HD visualization, anaglyph stereoscopic view and a 3D virtual model of both the structures and the bas-relieves. Herewith, a wall-mounted panel representing a metric 3D reconstruction of the building helps the user to find the artefact position. Descriptions of the hardware components and of the software development details are presented, with particular focus over the implementation of the application, arguing how the digital approach could represent the only answer towards a full exploitation of archaeological sites. The paper also deals with the implementation of a web tool, specifically designed to display and browse 3D-Models