Virtual Tour for Heritage Accessibility: The Case of Palazzo Carignano Museum

The digital transformation in the cultural heritage sector has led to the widespread adoption of Virtual Tours (VTs), which are intended as interactive simulations of real-world locations that allow users to explore and navigate spaces remotely. This trend was significantly accelerated by the global pandemic, which compelled cultural institutions to reassess their accessibility models and has produced a diverse landscape of technological solutions, revealing a critical need to move beyond simple digital replicas toward more integrated and meaningful interactions. In this paper, VT has been created to offer the public new visualizations of rooms and panoramas that are partially or fully inaccessible inside the Palazzo Carignano Museum. Therefore, VT faced the central goal of reducing obstacles, inequalities, and gaps that limit citizens’ participation in cultural life and heritage, favoring accessibility to rooms that are not accessible by the mobility-impaired or not visitable by the public due to safety reasons. A sequence of spherical images linked together by graphic elements that allow the photographs to be visited and scrolled makes up the VT. It will be available on the museum’s website and usable on-site via totems and handheld devices.