Browsing Spatial Photography for Dissemination of Cultural Heritage Research Results using Augmented Models

Abstract

Both digital and physical 3D models of buildings as well as historical photographs of architecture are used for a wide range of needs, from research in humanities and information technologies, museum contexts and library studies, to touristic applications. Spatially oriented photographs play an important role in visualizing and browsing contemporary as well as historical architecture, starting with the ground-breaking Photo Tourism project [SSS06]. We present a technique to combine physical, 3D-printed models of buildings with spatially registered historical photographic documents in a hand-held Augmented Reality (AR) environment. Users are enabled to spatially explore historical views of architecture by selecting photos from a collection of images, which are then utilized as textures for the physical model rendered on their respective mobile device. We compare different methods to spatially select photos registered to a physical model in hand-held AR.