ArcheoFOSS 2022
MAPOD4D: A Multi/Metaverse for Archaeology, Anthropology and Cultural Heritage

Panel: Electronic Publishing and Open Science in Archaeology

One of the most recent phenomena in the digital world is the metaverse “revolution”. Along with Facebook’s announcement of its rebranding into Meta, the word metaverse has been an hot topic of discussion in the past months. Although several commercial applications are already implemented or in the developing stage, metaverses applied to cultural heritage are still an unknown territory. Most digital research on cultural heritage dissemination has focused on virtual reality, with all its known issues and limits (Pujol Tost 2008: 106-7, Tan and Rahaman 2009: 146-9). This paper provides an overview of MAPOD4D (Taglioretti et al. 2021: 303-27) and its possible applications within archaeology, anthropology and cultural heritage in general. MAPOD4D is an open multiverse of metaverses (GPL3 with additional commercial limitation), meaning that it is a virtual environment, technically called a ‘multiverse’, that contains visitable meta-verses and some special elements technically called “minds” with which one can interact. This container can host a number of metaverses limited only by the ability of physical electronic devices to represent it, and it is affected by the same forces that can be experienced in the physical world (i.e. gravity and time). In addition to the ability to reproduce (infinite) metaverses, MAPOD4D is able to connect to external datasets such as databases, thus providing an environment where not only 3D models can be explored, but also tables, graphs and so on can be dynamically called. The possibility of exploring different levels of interaction in the same multiverse allows MAPOD4D not only to showcase the final product of heritage research but also the overlapping of different datasets and how they change over time. As an example of its application, we provide a small archaeological context (Ambiente 1 of the so-called Casa Torre in Castelseprio), in which we model the phases of the excavation and the different dataset used.

License Text and image are relesed under CC BY-ND 4.0 License. Copyright Marco Moderato, Roberto Taglioretti, Alessandra Mazzucchi, Vasco La Salvia 2022