Interactive and Immersive Tools for Point Clouds in Archaeology

Abstract

In this article, we present a framework for an immersive and interactive 3D manipulation of large point clouds, in the context of an archaeological study. The framework was designed in an interdisciplinary collaboration with archaeologists.We first applied this framework for the study of an 17th-century building of a Real Tennis court. We propose a display infrastructure associated with a set of tools that allows archaeologists to interact directly with the point cloud within their study process. The resulting framework allows an immersive navigation at scale 1:1 in a dense point cloud, the manipulation and production of cut plans and cross sections, and the positioning and visualisation of photographic views. We also apply the same framework to three other archaeological contexts with different purposes, a 13th century ruined chapel, a 19th-century wreck and a cremation urn from the Iron Age.