Mobile Augmented Heritage: Enabling Human Life in ancient Pompeii

We propose a new methodology for real-time mobile mixed reality systems that feature realistic simulations of animated virtual human actors (clothes, body, skin, face) who augment real environments and re-enact staged storytelling dramas. Although initially targeted at Cultural Heritage Sites, the paradigm is by no means limited to such subjects. The abandonment of traditional concepts of static cultural artifacts or rigid geometrical and 2D textual augmentations with 3D, interactive, augmented historical character-based event representations in a mobile and wearable setup, is the main contribution of the described work as well as the proposed extensions to AR Enabling technologies: a VR/AR character simulation kernel framework with character to object interaction, a markerless camera tracker specialized for non-invasive geometrical registration on heritage sites and a PRT mixed reality illumination model for more consistent real-virtual real-time rendering. We demonstrate a real-time case study on the actual site of ancient Pompeii.