Musealising the Virtual: the Virtual reality Project of the Scrovegni Chapel of Padua

1° BEST PAPER AWARD FOR CULTURAL MERIT. The Scrovegni Chapel, painted from Giotto in the period 1303-1305, is one of the most important masterpiece of the European art. Because of serious problems of preservation, the paintings have been restored in the last two years but the accessibility to the monument is now limited for number of visitors (20 people any time) and length (15 minutes at a time). In order to solve these problems of fruition the municipality of Padua has planned the creation of an hypermedia room (10 x 20 m) hosting multimedia and museum installations concerning the contextualization of the Giotto's world and of the Scrovegni Chapel. The most important installation is a virtual reality system created by the Institute of Technologies Applied to the Cultural Heritage of the National Research Council (Rome, team directed by Maurizio Forte) aimed to a spatial 3D reconstruction and re-composition of all the information regarding the Giotto's paintings and the internal architecture of the monument (33.000 polygons in real time, 500 links, more than 100 menus). In this way the visitors of the Chapel (last year about 600.000) will can prepare virtually the real visit to the monument (1st alphabetization) and then, they will can come back to the virtual installation in order to integrate all the information they will need (2nd re-alphabetization). We have defined this process of digital cultural learning through virtual exhibitions "musealising" the Virtual": the use of VR tools and applications will increase a reticular cultural learning (despite the traditional "linear" learning), catalyzing new consumes of virtual heritage.