Virtual Portals for a Smart Fruition of Historical and Archaeological Contexts

The experimentation of new effective visualization techniques provides viable technological solutions for the archaeological heritage fruition and the visitors involvement within cultural places (museums, gallery, archaeological sites). This article discusses the feasibility of a project aimed at extending outdoor the fruition of archaeological sites, by exploiting mixed reality technology. In a previous work we focused on the development of a mobile application that exploits the Augmented Reality technology, limited to an indoor fruition. Therefore we decided to extend the app by introducing a strategy for an on-site outdoor exploration based on “virtual portals”. Virtual portals are the medium that allows the transition from reality (present) to virtuality (past) and vice versa. They are located outdoor at some point of interest, so that user has the perception of passing through different space-temporal dimensions: this is actually what we want to provide as user personal experience. We considered two archaeological areas as case studies, both excavations sites of the University of Salento, as an instance of a wider network we aim to create. In this paper we give some hints about a feasible design for this project.