Cloud Computing and Augmented Realty for Cultural Heritage

In this paper the use of augmented realty and cloud computing technology to enrich the scenes of cultural heritage contexts is proposed. The main objective is to develop a mobile application capable to improve user cultural experience during city sightseeing through the addition of detailed digital contents related to the site or the monument he is watching. The Wikitude SDK is the software library and framework used for the mobile application development. The huge amount of culturale dig- ital contents (mainly represented by images) justifies the exploitation of a cloud computing environment to obtain an innovative, multi-platform and user friendly augmented reality enriched solution. In particular, for the purpose of our research we’ve chosen KVM and OpenNebula open-source cloud platform as private cloud technology, since it exhibits great features like openness, flexibility, simplicity and scalability. The result of the work is validated through test beds realized both in laboratory, using images captured from PC display, and in a real environment.