Marine virtual environment to access underwater cultural heritage

In the field of underwater cultural heritage, advanced technologies and tools are under development aiming at discovering, mapping, studying and securing archaeological sites. In this paper, we describe the system developed in order to disseminate the data collected during underwater exploration and to provide, to the archeologist, an effective tool to explore and analyze each explored underwater archaeological site. With this aim, the system exploits collected raw data together with the results of the detailed analysis and embeds them in a 3D interactive and informative scene. The scene is accessible both by the experts (for research purposes) and by general public (for dissemination of the underwater cultural heritage).