Reality vs. Virtual Modelling: From Building to Landscape Heritage Representation

The development of digital representations of the cultural heritage is symptomatic of the broader trend toward digitisation that the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operation (AECO) sector is facing, combining the act of drawing with the act of modelling geometries and information. New approaches, such as Historic/Heritage Building Information Modelling (HBIM) or Landscape Information Modelling (LIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS), offer possible solutions for the digital representation of the existing environment, from building to landscape. New technologies and processes are progressively allowing the merging of several kinds of data in virtual models to understand the past, represent the present, and design the future. These virtual models support both the digital visualization of different static configurations and the dynamic update of data in input/output through sensors and actuators. The connection between virtual and real environments is always more investigated and has different possible applications (e.g., management, simulation, transformation, valorization), not only in the cultural heritage field. After defining the term 'model' and the evolution of this concept in the AECO sector, this contribution presents an overview of different outputs of virtual models to outline the most innovative approaches in information communication, concerning the building scale and wider elements of the natural and built environment.