LA REALTÀ VIRTUALE IMMERSIVA PER LA CONOSCENZA DEL PATRIMONIO CULTURALE: IL QUARTIERE ALESSANDRINO A ROMA.

Virtual reality as a means of knowledge is, to date, still little developed and widespread. There are few and rare cases in which it is used in museums as a tool for disseminating information that is more understandable in an immersive reality. The themes are among the most disparate, but it is obvious that the common concept of every VR project is the representation of a three-dimensional space, be it real but digitalized, invented or reconstructed. Surely this last case is the one of most interest, because it allows the first-person navigability of architectures never realized, or, even more suggestive, of projects or neighbourhoods no longer built because destroyed by man or by natural causes. In Rome, to build the Empire Road in the 1930s, the entire Alessandrino district was razed to the ground. For years the research group has been carrying out studies on the virtual reconstruction of the area, with highly detailed models linked to the rigorous and scientific correspondence of the result with the archival documentation. Today, thanks to the collaboration with Imago, we begin the process of Virtual Reality of the district that allows 360 ° immersive VR navigation through devices (viewers and mobile phones with Android and iOS operating systems) of the 3D elaboration on an obligatory exploratory path. The possibility of proposing the virtualization of the virtual space, for example at the Rome museum at Palazzo Braschi, where the wooden model of the reconstruction of the neighbourhood is already exposed, is only one of the possible outlets of the current state of research.