Reconstructing Conimbriga digital cantaber

Being the ancient cultural heritage structures and artefacts so full of detail and relevance to studies related to our past, it would be desirable to have precise virtual replicas that could be freely explored without endangering important pieces of history. However, the costs to produce three-dimensional environments are sometimes discouraging, due to the significant cost of some 3D authoring tools, and to the time necessary to manually produce the models. This paper presents a low-cost alternative to the classic manual modelling process, towards the production of highly detailed virtual models, by using open source software and a low-cost moving depth camera. The ambition is the dissemination of our cultural heritage legacy, making it accessible, not only to experts, but also to the general public, without requiring any high-performance hardware, authoring software or professional 3D skills. For the visualization, our virtual reconstructions will be available through a three-dimensional live model viewer, based on recent technologies such as HTML5 and WebGL. Those may be triggered from a wide variety of device, contributing in this way to a true democratization of history knowledge. The proposed approach was applied to create a virtual model of the so-called “House of Cantaber”.