HBIM and Virtual Tools: A New Chance to Preserve Architectural Heritage

Nowadays, architectural heritage is increasingly exposed to dangers due to natural disasters or human invasive actions. However, management and conservation represent crucial phases within the life cycle of historical buildings. Unfortunately, the complexity of conservation practices and the lack of knowledge of historic buildings are the cause of an inefficient recovering process in case of emergencies. To overcome this problem, this research aims to ensure the preservation of relevant information through the use of building information modeling (BIM) methodology. By developing historic building information models (HBIMs), it is possible to enhance the architectural heritage. This represents an opportunity to incorporate digital media into the global heritage conservation field. To achieve this goal, a historical castle was selected as a case study; this unique piece of architecture is located in the Piedmont Region, close to city of Turin (Italy). The results show a direct relation between a historical digital model, finalized to the management of architectural and system components, and visualization tools. To conclude, the adoption of this strategy is an effective way to preserve and consult information using advanced visualization techniques based on augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR).