T e m p u s

Visual browsing system for consulting time changes of buildings

Presentation

Various aspects condition the analysis and the interpretation of cultural heritage. In fact, historical sites can have a rich and complex history, sometimes full of changes, sometimes only partially known by means of documentary sources. NUBES tempus is a tool for structuring and organizing building entities according to their transformation in time.

This interface integrates to Nubes Visum architecture a visualization tool for edifice temporal evolutions through historical graphs. The web application is based on an architecture divided into three parts:

• real-time geometry manipulation: a 3D scene developed in Virtools DEV allows downloading, displaying and manipulating different restitutions;

• building transformation visualization: a SVG interface allows reading historical transformations by means of serverside dynamic graphs generated with PHP on MySQL;

• online consultation: a PHP page allows the user to select projects, temporal states, assumptions, and display data.

Data is organized in a relational base developed in MySQL, containing information regarding geometric entities (spatial and temporal information, certainty degree, assumption).

Functionalities currently implemented in this comprehension aid tool are:

• accessing and manipulating space-time 3D-models in space

• displaying temporal changes and assumptions through colour coding

• comparing temporal states by means of colour coding selected by the user

• displaying dynamic history graphs as tool to view evolutions at different scales (spatial and temporal), to retain transformation history, to interact with geometry.

Screen captures

Videos