Enhancing the Recovery Process for Historic Buildings through Virtual Environments Based on Panoramas Integrated with Informative System

Effective collection and management of data are pivotal in the recovery process of architectural heritage. This is enhanced by the necessity to support multi-disciplinary analyses and process various data sources that need to be shared and interpreted by technicians for the assessment of buildings. Instead, digital evolution has encouraged scientific activities in using Virtual Environments (VEs) to overcome geometric and semantic complexities in the representation and analysis of historic buildings. It is the case of Virtual Tours (VTs), which result from the systematization of single spherical images and properly enhanced with thematic contents, ensuring a full fruition of the virtualized architecture also in an immersive way. The chapter presents an operative flow for the setup of a VE, based on spherical images and integrated with an informative system, for the enhancement of the multi-disciplinary knowledge in the overall recovery process, from the systematization of technical knowledge to the diagnosis phase, the identification of causes and subsequent classes of intervention for historic buildings, starting from previous experiences. Specifically, the VE is structured as a unique digital tool where parallel VTs show thematic information and a relational database supports technical decisions of experts for causes and interventions, in a semi-automatic way. This aims at improving the overall quality of restoration design.