Transforming Cultural Heritage in 3D: Potentials and Consequences of the Digitalization of Cultural Heritage

One of the most important fields of work in digital heritage is the digitization of cultural heritage, which is increasingly being recorded in the form of 3D objects. Technological advances are enabling new forms of reconstruction and presentation of cultural heritage, while at the same time new forms of communication and interaction with real objects and their digital representations are being established. Access to cultural heritage is currently been revolutionized, as direct physical access to objects and sites is no longer a basic prerequisite for experiencing them. This now also applies, with restrictions, to (world) cultural heritage sites, although their digitization poses particular challenges, especially in the field of knowledge transfer. An area that is essentially committed to an educational discourse is thus given the opportunity and at the same time confronted with the challenge of opening up to a broad social reception mass, which can be assumed to be very diverse in its requirements for suitable forms of knowledge transfer and knowledge acquisition. 

This context of the transfer of scientific content to the non-scientific public raises a number of archaeological, technical, social science and legal questions, which the research network aims to address in interdisciplinary cooperation on the basis of several best-practice examples. The central component here is the digital recording and re-representation of the World Heritage Site of the Barbara Baths in Trier.The Baths of St. Barbara - once the second largest bathing complex in the Roman Empire - are an acutely endangered cultural heritage site that is to be presented in a completely new way using digital mediation concepts. Its digitization in the form of a high-resolution 3D model forms the basis for a new mediation concept, which, however, faces the challenge of mastering the processing and handling of large amounts of data and also making it generally accessible.

The combination of different high-resolution 3D digitization methods such as structured light scanning, laser scanning or photogrammetry and the resulting data with various, sometimes interactive, models requires the development of new workflows. Research data management is an important aspect of processing. Financially viable data storage options are being evaluated for this purpose. The visualization of the final 3D objects will be continuously adapted to the required level of detail of the current image section by expanding existing and developing new data formats and integrating them into existing frameworks and program libraries. The structures used for this purpose will already take into account the possibilities for hierarchical annotation. Access will be almost device-independent in a web browser.