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3D Digitization of Tangible Heritage

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Handbook of Cultural Heritage Analysis

Abstract

Digitization of tangible entities is the process that focuses on the transformation of the real world and its features to a virtual world, the digital world of computing devices. This virtual world comes along with a typical set of rules, benefits, limitations, and opportunities. As this world is mathematically digital, every virtual entity is discretized and quantized, being only an approximation of its real counterpart, or “source,” or “parent.” Digitized tangible entities run a parallel life, potentially a life with no ending, as the most apparent benefit of the virtual world is the long-lasting presence. Since tangible heritage entities constitute the most radiant examples of human civilization, they are the obvious targets for digitization. Particularly, since these entities are of three dimensions (3D), their digitization should also follow the 3D world representation; let us forget the fourth dimension, time, in this case, since this is the dimension that can be “frozen” with 3D digitization. 3D digitization of precious entities not only safeguards them in the virtual world but also opens up new horizons for presentation, knowledge dissemination, research and study, conservation, and even physical duplication. In order for these horizons to actually open, human ingenuity with long-lasting and painstaking research and development resulted a number of 3D digitization methods, all targeting the best possible result in terms of an accurate virtual replication. This is the focus of this chapter, in which an attempt is made to explain the ideas and inner workings of the various 3D digitization methods that have been invented during the last half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Athena-Research and Innovation Centre in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies, University Campus at Kimmeria, Xanthi, Greece

    George Pavlidis & Anestis Koutsoudis

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  1. George Pavlidis
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  2. Anestis Koutsoudis
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Correspondence to George Pavlidis or Anestis Koutsoudis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geosciences, University of Malta, Msida, Malta

    Sebastiano D'Amico

  2. University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Valentina Venuti

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Pavlidis, G., Koutsoudis, A. (2022). 3D Digitization of Tangible Heritage. In: D'Amico, S., Venuti, V. (eds) Handbook of Cultural Heritage Analysis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60016-7_47

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