EXTENSION

Objectives of the service

Image credit: Carsa Ltd, Project: Extension

The City of L’Aquila, after the earthquake of 2009, tried hard to recover the cultural heritage that seemed to have been lost forever, while looking for its own history among the rubble. Hence the need to preserve what has been rebuilt and what has yet to be restored. Therefore the purpose of this Project is to create an end-to-end service for the City of L'Aquila which provides the possibility for the Municipality to enhance both preservation and fruition and diffusion of its cultural heritage. The improvements we pursue are low latency and greater information volume, possibility to map surface deformation, precise georeferencing, possibility to access information and contents which would not be visible otherwise.

Users and their needs

Users are:

the Municipality of L’Aquila, users’ representative of a varied group of users, namely municipalities in general, Tourist development authorities, Chambers of Commerce, Destination Management Company, destination Management Organizations, Regions;
tourists;
conservators, restorers, art historians.

Use needs:

using AR in order to enhance the value of cultural heritage of L'Aquila
to monitor the conditions of the territory of L'Aquila, in particular in relation with the 2009 earthquake, aiming at the preservation of cultural heritage
Users wish to have a more entertaining, immersive and possibly interacting tourist experience
Users wish to get instant information, either textual, visual or audio, on their end device (for example their smartphone) about what they are seeing
Users wish to receive a proposed itinerary to visit all the most interesting attractions in the city
Users wish to receive commercial suggestions about the best restaurants and shops as well as information about transport
Users wish to receive information about cultural events that are available in situ
Providing information regarding restoration and preservation status of the artwork observed (to see beyond the visible)
The display of images needs to be simple, understandable and fast

Service/ system concept

The final goal of the project is to realize an innovative app to enhance preservation and fruition of the cultural heritage for the city of L’Aquila, oriented to the support of cultural production and to the setting up of solutions for innovation in the tourist offer of the territory.

The key activities related to the software implementation are:

Exploit a disruptive AR mobile app
Create 3D contents
Include a visual monument recognizer, that allows to identify the seen monument and get access to additional textual/visual information
Setup a SAR image analysis for Cultural Heritage remote monitoring
Application of image-based multispectral diagnostic techniques
Audio content creation
Guarantee a precise georeferencing in an Italian old town, which is often characterized by a lack of GPS connection, thanks to GNSS
Low latency and greater information volume allow the app to be highly responsive and to load the contents as soon as the user frames a monument or a of interest thanks to MEC service and 5G network.

A diagram of the system showing the key attributes and key building blocks and the main interfaces is provided in the figure below:

Image credit: CARSA SRL, Project : Extension

Space Added Value

Thanks to the space added value and the 5G technology we are able to pursue the following improvements, namely:

5G and MEC service: Low latency and greater information volume;
InSar: Possibility to map surface deformation;
GNSS: Precise georeferencing in an Italian old town, which is often characterized by a lack of GPS connection.

The information from Cosmo-SkyMed (InSar) can be applied to sites of interest in order to get the evidence of ground and infrastructures displacements. 5G makes faster to reach and obtain the above-mentioned information and the GNSS allows to detect the accurate localization of the user. All these three elements together are functional in order to guarantee a disruptive and immersive tour, making the user totally and fully aware of the place he/she is visiting.