ARTworks: An Augmented Reality Interface as an Aid for Restoration Professionals

Augmented Reality (AR) has proven to provide effective tools to assist the human work in a wide range of sectors. Many examples can be found in literature of innovative AR tools used in medicine, industry and the military fields. Recently AR has been successfully applied also to cultural heritage, mainly for communication and educational purposes. Nevertheless, we argue that also the activity of professional operators dealing with cultural heritage, such as conservators and restorers, can benefit from the use of AR-systems. The restoration process commonly builds on the analysis and study of prior interventions and, very often, on the results of pre-operative diagnoses performed on the artwork. All the information gathered during these stages is necessary during the restoration and, using AR, it can be directly overlaid on top of the artwork avoiding the necessity of a continuous visual switch between the artwork and the documentation. Moreover, through an AR-system, new digital information can be produced directly while working, fostering also new forms of documentation. We hereby present ARTworks, an AR-system intended to assist the restorer both during the operating phases, providing contextualized information, and during documentation, allowing the insertion of new registered digital information. The system, composed by amechanical interface and an Android tablet, has been purposely designed taking into account the particular application field of restoration.