Streamlining exploitation of digital archaeological sites: A scalable authoring platform to build digital twins of cultural heritage for research and dissemination

Archaeological sites and artifacts are critical for understanding historical contexts, and maintaining their integrity is a vital undertaking. At the same time, ensuring their accessibility to enable direct study and exploration is essential for both researchers and the general public. To this aim, various works have explored the use of Digital Twins (DTs) for Cultural Heritage (CH) preservation and dissemination. However, the current state of the art remains fragmented and heterogeneous, with most approaches relying on ad hoc, case-specific solutions that are rarely reusable. In particular, existing research is often centered on individual digitization projects rather than on scalable frameworks that support the systematic creation and reuse of multiple DTs. Building on these considerations, this paper presents a scalable platform designed to streamline the construction and exploitation of archaeological DTs, enabling the rapid creation of case studies for both research and dissemination purposes. Specifically, we propose a no-code authoring environment that integrates 3D reconstructions of sites and artifacts with associated semantic information (e.g., annotations and points of interest), allowing users with limited technical expertise to create and manage DT-based experiences. The resulting case studies can be edited, organized, shared, and explored through both desktop and Virtual Reality interfaces. The platform positioning with respect to existing solutions has been explicitly investigated through a comparative analysis against representative state-of-the-art systems. In addition, the proposed approach has been evaluated through quantitative performance measurements, a comparative study, and two user studies targeting the Research and Dissemination modes, respectively. The platform was co-designed with curators from the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, and validated through case studies based on two archaeological sites from Deir el-Medina, Egypt.