Digital fabrication technologies for cultural heritage (STAR)

Digital Fabrication technologies exploit a variety of basic technologies to create tangible reproductions of 3D digital models. Even though current 3D printing pipelines still suffer of several restrictions, the reproduction accuracy has gradually reached an excellent level. Thanks to this advancement, the interests of manufacturing industry with respect to 3D printing techniques has significantly grown during the last decade. However, digital fabrication techniques have been demonstrated to be effective also in other contexts, such as medical applications and Cultural Heritage (CH). The goal of this survey paper is to introduce briefly the different fabrication technologies, to discuss some successful utilization of 3D printing in the CH domain and, finally, to review the work done so far to extend fabrication technology capabilities to cope with the specific issues that characterize the usage of digital fabrication in the CH domain.