Sensitive environments. Spatial interactive technologies for preserving cultural heritage

The digital dimension has wasted no time in making its impact felt in the cultural heritage. Many museums have been providing a web-based taste of what they have to offer since back in the nineties: sometimes, this has been no more than a mere exercise in positioning, while others have created simulations of their interiors, achieving a degree of correspondence between the physical and virtual dimensions, and others again have used 3D representation and simulation media (such as VRLM or QuickTime VR). In the first generation of such projects, the focus was on blending in and simulating, while today’s potential for spatial (even before 3D) ostentation has opened the way to new scenarios, whose languages and approaches overwrite the conventional visit to a container of culture. The digital dimension is breaking out of its favourite role (the web) and into the reality of space, shaping it to suit hybrid logics that range from a theatrical rendering of information to triggering proxemic and emotional responses; permeating and overlapping real space, like a layer of knowledge, and directly manipulating the virtual dimension, where it questions physical objects by interacting with a conceptual space. Since traditional models of museum design provide pre-determined, fixed spatial settings, the experience they introduce remains symbolic, narrative and sequential. Compared to this, the new frontiers of digital museum design work on a logic that is closer to the real world, blending the place where the interaction takes place together with the display, so that the visitor’s gestures move away from projection and metaphor and towards simulating physical gestures. Technology is becoming an increasingly transparent tool for involving the observeruser in meta-narratives: potential layers of the cultural tale that explode and/or recompose units of meaning co-ordinated by a unifying act of direction. This new paradigm is matched by a change in perspective: instead of a surface where contact takes place, what is designed now is an interactive event, a performance that is staged to take place in the user-author’s space-time.