3D-GIS as a platform for visual analysis: Investigating a Pompeian house

The aim of the present work is to introduce an innovative framework for employing 3D-GIS as an exploratory platform to perform visual analysis. Such a methodology is aimed at detecting patterns of visibility to simulate the past human perception of specific categories of artifacts placed inside a virtually reconstructed three-dimensional space. As a case study, the house of Caecilius Iucundus in Pompeii (regio V, insula 1, entrances 23 and 26) was chosen and two media of visual communication, a painting and a graffito were tested to make an assessment of their visual impact on hypothetical observers. The approach consists of a vector-based line-of-sight (LOS) analysis, now available as an integral component of the 3D-analyst toolkit of the ESRI ArcGIS 10.x software package. This toolkit allowed us to perform the entire process inside a GIS environment, without splitting the tasks among different software platforms. It was thus possible to detect a significant difference in terms of visibility among the observed objects. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.