Equirectangular Pictures and Surrounding Visual Experience. Spherical Immersive Photographic Projections at: Boito Architetto Archivio Digitale, Historical Exhibition at Politecnico di Milano

Abstract

The inter-institutional university research between the Politecnico di Milano and the Accademia di Brera (2021–2022), to which this survey has participated, has collected, classified and shared in digital formats the various archival and documentary sources about Camillo Boito: one of the most significant architects in the historical and cultural period of the Unification of Italy. Some of my previous publications on spherical photo-cameras, and about the devices for displaying these images through AR/VR viewers, are here contextualised in particular around the case of research on the meticulous spatiality conceived and realized by the architect Camillo Boito (1836–1914) in some significant projects. This further experience on the field made it possible to verify the functionality and effectiveness of the visualisation of spherical views, not only in technological terms, but in a comparative manner with respect to the usual methods of representing architecture, implying some methodological deductions. In this short essay I therefore briefly propose some methods and results from the survey on two case studies of 19th century interior spaces, through the graphic aspects that can be visualised by the geometric algorithms for their treatment as spherical images, and some considerations deduced from these experiments in the process of geometric visualisation of the designed space.