Building a FLOSS Multi/Metaverse for Cultural Heritage: MAPOD4D

Abstract

One of the most recent phenomena in the digital world is the metaverse "revolution". Along with Facebook®'s announcement of its rebranding into Meta®, the word metaverse has been a hot topic of discussion in the past months. Although several commercial applications are already implemented or in the developing stage, metaverses applied to cultural heritage are still an unknown territory. The digital evolution, especially in the gaming industry has pushed the virtual environment to a new level, while showing that also videogames can convey a sense of interest and realism through historically (more or less) accurate worlds (Huggett 2020, 2).

Most digital research on cultural heritage dissemination has focused on virtual reality, with all its known issues and limits, applying mainly to architectural reconstructions (Pujol Tost 2008: 106-7, Tan and Rahaman 2009: 146-9). Often these virtual realities are also passive, meaning that the interaction (where present) is limited to the 3D environment itself.

This paper provides an overview of MAPOD4D (Multi Analysis PrObe Drone 4D) as an example of a metaverse environment applied to different fields of cultural heritage.

MAPOD4D is an innovative platform and framework for developing a multiverse of metaverses with a specific application in the field of archaeology, anthropology, history, art, and cultural heritage in general.

The platform, the framework and the projects are developed with FLOSS software only, with the aim of maintaining cost sustainability, meaning that MAPOD4D is fully compliant to 4 laws of free libre software: the freedom to use the software for any purpose, the freedom to change the software to suit your needs, the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and the freedom to share the changes you make.

In addition to the ability to reproduce (infinite) metaverses, MAPOD4D can connect to external datasets such as databases, raster, and vector data, thus providing an environment where not only 3D models can be explored, but also tables, graphs and so on can be dynamically called. This means that the interaction within MAPOD4D is not limited to the virtual reality but they embrace the datasets from which the reality was created. At this stage of development, MAPOD4D has already been tested against real datasets, with the creation of instances based on existing anthropological and archaeological examples. MAPOD4D's applications range from pure research to dissemination and span across the different branches of cultural heritage.

Hereby we provide two applications of MAPOD4D:

As an anthropological example, we propose a simulation of an osteological and interactive laboratory with the 3D digitization of grave 14 from Lovere (BG, Italy). The bones were arranged in anatomical and stand positions; the pathological elements are shown with radiological supporting analysis, and we focused on elements and methods for age determination.

As for the application in archaeology, a context of the excavation of Casa Piccoli in Castelseprio (VA, Italy) was reconstructed through MAPOD4D. MAPOD was populated with data from the dig: archaeological layers were modelled as three-dimensional objects and inserted into the relevant metaverse. To these were added, at the current state of the work, measurements of magnetic anomalies and sounds. nFinally, the restitution of the stratigraphic sequence at the house-fort of Castelseprio is being planned.