Street-ARt. Communication of Street Art Works Through Augmented Reality

Street art is a growing global phenomenon. The frequent appearance of works, projects and events reveals its increasing social and cultural role worldwide. Unfortunately, Street art creations are often hardly visible in urban areas. Besides, few national and international databases collect the characteristics of these artworks. The chance of digitising artworks represents a way to gain these cultural paths on the urban areas, providing an additional tool to understand and interpret it, connecting with other creations in the same area, freezing their memory, and mapping its change over time. Street art is characterised by aspects that make it unique in the artistic panorama. The contents’ democratisation and the work’s physical decay are two pillars. Any digitisation and communication project should consider them carefully, proposing a knowledge model respectful of the artwork. Augmented Reality (AR) is a representation tool that achieves that delicate balance between the real and the digital, enhancing both specificities. The chance of connecting the artwork with descriptive and multimedia content can significantly improve its visibility, enhancing its presence in the urban context. AR can also fill this information gap in the artwork, providing a stimulus for multigenerational reading that brings different audiences to Street art, integrating with existing platforms and proposing new cultural paths. The authors** start with artwork digitisation, showing experimental data about the connection between image deterioration and image AR recognition. Besides, they show some possible applications in Rome through a critical domain analysis, opening some future multifaceted scenarios.