The use of digital twin technologies to preserve cultural heritage has
become increasingly common over the past two decades. Evolving from the use of
virtual environments (VE) and digital reconstructions that required multiple
phases of workflow and multiple software applications and various hardware to
output a useable experience to the immediacy of 3D artificial intelligence (AI)
generative content and the latest generation of photogrammetric scanning, non-specialists
are now able to more easily create digital twins. At the same time, the destruction of cultural heritage has accelerated due to geopolitical instability,
seen in examples such as the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (2022). Even with advances in
user-friendly and commercially available technologies, digital art history and
the digital humanities are in a race against time to train and equip enough
individuals onsite to create digital twins before more irreplaceable cultural
artifacts and sites are lost to natural disasters,
accelerated by climate change, or through armed conflict. However, there remain
no international standards for methodological reproducibility and the techniques
used currently by many scholars include specialized training and knowledge. As
such, this paper presents a case study that addresses reproducibility and explainability
in the digital humanities through a detailed workflow of the creation of a
digital twin of Chiesa dei SS Apostoli e Biagio in Florence, Italy. A model is
presented that is scalable and leverages widely available, user-friendly 360
cameras and photogrammetry with LiDAR to capture cultural heritage sites with
best practices on how to quickly and effectively train non-specialists to
create site-specific digital twins of a variety of cultural heritage
structures.
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