Digital Twin: a new perspective for cultural heritage management and fruition

Abstract

This paper describes the example of an interesting distance visit approach carried out during the COVID-19 emergency, applied to an underground oil-mill in the town of Gallipoli (Puglia, Italy). The limitations of access for people with disabilities and the complete closure of Italian museums during the emergency have suggested the development of an immersive platform, in the broader perspective of using the output in accordance to digital twin perspectives. Then a tool to support an innovative visit method has been realized: a virtual visit assisted by a real remote guide, hereinafter referred to as “Live-Guided Tour” with e-learning functionality. All this has been made possible starting from a three-dimensional model of an underground oil-mill, from which we extracted the stereoscopic scenes. The stereoscopy is very important for the overall success of the project, because this aspect influences the level of interest, the immersion and the ability to generate emotion and wonder. To the best of Author’s knowledge, this is the only system available today for a shared virtual visit for an inaccessible context, which implements many features of a VR visit in a multi-user and multi-platform environment.