Documentazione, Rilievo integrato, modellazione 3D e studio geometrico-strutturale della cupola di Haghia Sophia a Istanbul

After our survey campaign deployed in Istanbul (July 2003) when we used a 3D scanner to measure most of the interior of Haghia Sophia; after the elaboration of data in order to creatte both 2-dimension and 3-dimension models; after the necessary geometricl studies about the dome shape; we passed to elaborate a 3D model of the intrados of the dome, in order to check how good some of the 3D browsers available on the market were when the model wasn’t just a three-dimensional object, but had complex surfaces created by using points clouds. To do this we used the Haghia Sophia dome model. We have first investigated the problem of simplifying it quite a bit in order to make it compatible with the current transmission possibilities of the web and the workings of conventional personal computers. Even if we can confirm the validity of the overall approach, the results are nonetheless provisional, because we still have to improve the simplification procedure of the original model as well as making the transmitted data more compact (these are the two most important parameters at the moment). However we’ve been able to experiment a slightly different approach to the previous one. In this case, the software we used allowed us to create on a normal web page frame hosting an interactive model of the object capable as well of providing external links to documentary databases. There’s also another important possibility: stereoscopy. In fact, the frame in question can either be visualised monoscopically, if the client’s computer has the necessary hardware components , or in stereoscopy which obviously improves the immediate comprehension we talked about earlier and which is one of our main aims. Stereoscopic visualisation is, at the moment, a sort of “embellishment” of the traditional 3D model, but it is not far from incorporating the characteristic features of photogrammetric stereoscopy, especially with regard to the metric exploration and survey of the model.