Mobile Extended Reality for the Enhancement of an Underground Oil Mill: A Preliminary Discussion

The enhancement of the cultural heritage and the promotion of the territory, with a peculiar attention to alternative routes and decentralized places of interest, is receiving more and more attention from the ICT world. In particular, Extended Reality (XR) technology (Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality) is becoming quite pivotal in this process. In this context, two main critical issues are experienced: (a) places accessibility, in particular for sites that are often difficult to visit and (b) valorisation of itineraries and rural heritage, for those points-of-interest that are particularly important for the narration of the territory, even though outside the mainstream circuit. This is a perspective paper to preliminarily discuss the feasibility of two different widely used mobile applications, aimed at exploiting virtual and mixed reality technologies to promote an underground oil mill in Salento. The underlying problems and the steps that the authors intend to follow to develop the system will be briefly treated.