Ricerc@Sapienza

In recent years, novel documentation, preservation and presentation methods have been introduced to deal with challenges faced by archaeology in contemporary society. In particular, temporal analyses and multi-temporal 3D reconstruction have been considered in order to explicitly consider how time affects the archaeological sites. Such 4D reconstruction methods provide crucial information to the archaeologists in various scenarios. In particular, these ranges from studying the evolution of the site and its context to its repairing in cases of damages due to natural or anthropic causes or in cases of deliberate destruction, as is recently observed in the Near East. On the other hand, technologies like virtual and augmented reality, smart interfaces and massively parallel computing, provide methods to collect and process large amounts of space-time data, as well as proposing novel ways for interacting with this data and manipulate relevant semantic information. Such methods can also provide useful tools to the archaeologists facilitating their tasks during archaeological excavation. Namely, these tools enable the participation of larger teams in the monitoring and documentation of remote sites, and allow a better dissemination and presentation of discoveries both via traditional and digital means.
Building on the aforementioned methods, this project introduces a system for creating a 4D reconstruction of an excavation site both online and offline, enabling to add possible semantic annotations of relevant discoveries via smart interfaces based on gaze tracking, gesture and speech recognition. With its ability to online generate 3D models, the system allows teams to participate to the excavation from remote locations. At the same time, the final 4D semantically annotated models of the site and the artefacts are crucial for ongoing and future archaeological operations and provide precious information which will be accessible to the general public via different media.