Photographic Virtual Reality and Architectural Heritage

Multimedia applications in the field of cultural heritage represent a great opportunity to spread the knowledge about the history, culture and tourist environment of a specific site. But this kind of applications requires a large effort in term of costs in order to guarantee the high quality needed. This requirement has also a remarkable impact on the technology used to realize the multimedia contents as well as on the lifecycle and the methodology adopted to develop the application software. The application described in this paper is related to the architectural heritage, which, due to the specifically visual impact of sculpture and architecture, needs a special photographic technique to be displayed in a virtual tour. We describe, moreover, how, by using a HDM methodology, we developed a general-purpose run-time engine reducing the costs needed to realize new applications.