3D Modelling and Virtual Reality for Museum Heritage Presentation: Contextualisation of Sculpture from the Tang Era

The present research concerns the contextualisation and presentation of eleven small statues from the Tang era dated from the XI and XII centuries CE today housed at the Asian Art Museum in Turin (MAO). A multidisciplinary group with expertise in Asian art, digital representation, and information processing systems, with the support of VR@POLITO and MOD Lab Arch of the Politecnico di Torino is involved in the work. The goal is to present together several Tang-era pottery models not belonging to the same funerary outfit within the spaces of a coeval, philologically compatible hypogeal tomb. With a pronounced storytelling intent, the reconstructive 3D model represents a virtual exhibition project summarizing Tang art’s architectural, pictorial, and sculptural features. The pipeline was developed through photogrammetric acquisition with Structure from Motion (SfM) technology and 3D modeling of the artworks, reconstructive modeling and texturing of a Tang tomb as the ideal space of the statues, and communication through a virtual reality (VR) experience augmented with a set of information.