Advanced Mixed Heritage: A Visual Turn Through Digitality and Reality of Architecture

Aim of the article is to reflect on how digital technologies and ICT are changing the way to analyze, visualize, and communicate architectural heritage. In particular, mixed reality apps favor the constant and ubiquitous combination of reality and virtuality. A new kind of advanced heritage grows, characterized by the mix of tangible heritage and digital heritage: Reality enriches with information and virtuality acquires new potentialities with its matching with reality. This process moves from the development of digital informative models made by 3-D and database complex models, characterized by real time manipulability, navigation and interaction. This context renews people's relationship with images, allowing a sort of “visual turn” in built heritage field, where reality reaffirms its centrality, and the digital sphere opens to new opportunities in architectural heritage's studying, computing, experiencing, and valorization. Follows a claim for transparency of information and computer-based visualization.