Techniques and procedures for the definition of AR applications in architectural and archaeological contexts

The growth and development of Augmented reality applications and their use in different contexts has been recently fostered by two factors: i) the hardware and computing power of mobile devices has been radically improved; ii) Apple and Google have released two development platforms for AR applications. AR has been a major topic in research on cultural heritage fruition for many years, but the latest developments are really promising, and they seem capable of overcoming the difficulties that have delayed the diffusion of this technology. The paper focuses the potential and criticalities of augmented reality systems used for fruition purposes in architectural and archaeological contexts. The description of the research experience starts with the strategies adopted for the construction of the models, which have been developed using laser scanning and photogrammetric surveys as references; the following discussion will be dedicated to the solutions adopted to overcome the most critical features in AR applications, e.g. georeferencing.