The Challenge
The 1915 Marsica earthquake leveled Avezzano almost entirely, erasing neighborhoods, landmarks, and an architectural identity that most living residents have never seen. Historical photographs existed — scattered across archives, mostly black and white, inaccessible to the general public. The Rotary Club of Avezzano and the Comune di Avezzano wanted a way to make this lost heritage tangible — not just as a museum exhibit, but as something the whole community could experience in multiple contexts.
What We Built
Three complementary installations, each reaching a different audience through a different medium, all sharing the same reconstructed 3D city.
VR Installation — A fully immersive virtual reality experience powered by our Explore framework. Visitors put on a headset and walk through the reconstructed streets as they appeared before 1915, with room-scale navigation, interactive points of interest explaining each building's history, and AI-colorized historical photographs integrated into the environment.
Phygimap Interactive Display — A physical-digital hybrid where visitors interact with a tangible map surface that triggers corresponding digital visualizations. Touch a neighborhood and the screen reveals the 3D reconstruction of that area, layered with historical photos, archival documents, and contextual narratives. Designed to be accessible for all ages, from schoolchildren to elderly visitors who recognize the stories behind the buildings.
AR Mobile App — Available on iOS and Android, the app transforms smartphones into windows to the past. Standing in present-day Piazza San Bartolomeo, users point their device and see the entire square as it appeared before the earthquake — buildings, facades, and urban details superimposed on the current landscape in real-time augmented reality.
Permanent Home
The VR and Phygimap installations are permanently housed at the Aia dei Musei museum in Avezzano, accessible during regular opening hours. The AR experience works on-location throughout the city and is available for free download.
Technical Approach
The 3D reconstruction was modeled from archival photographs and architectural documentation with AI-powered colorization to transform black-and-white historical photos into full color. All three platforms run on Unity with our Explore plugin handling navigation, interaction, and content management across VR and AR contexts.
Impact
The project has become both an educational resource and a point of civic identity. Schools use the installations for history lessons. Elderly residents revisit places from their parents' memories. Tourists discover a layer of the city that no guidebook covers. The AR app, in particular, creates a powerful spatial connection — standing where a building once stood and seeing it rise through your phone screen bridges the gap between abstract historical knowledge and lived experience.
Accessibility by design
For a museum installation, accessibility isn't a layer added at the end — it's a project constraint from the first commit. A cultural experience has to speak to everyone — children, the elderly, people with sensory or motor disabilities — with no second-class paths.
We design experiences like this to the WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines and the European EN 301 549 standard — the reference point of EU Directive 2016/2102 and Italy's Legge Stanca for apps and services of public cultural institutions:
- Multimodality: every piece of content delivered across multiple channels — visual, audio, tactile — so information stays usable even without reading the screen. Here the Phygimap pairs the display with tangible surfaces.
- Alternative paths: not everyone can wear a headset. The interactive display and AR app offer the same city to people with motor, vestibular, or visual limitations.
- Assistive-technology support: VoiceOver and TalkBack, scalable text (Dynamic Type), semantic labels, touch targets ≥ 44px.
- Contrast and legibility: AA-level contrast ratios, resizable typography, no information carried by color alone.
- Respectful motion: honoring the system "reduce motion" preference for people with vestibular disorders.
- Understandable content: captions and transcripts for narration, plain language, predictable navigation.
That's how heritage once "inaccessible to the general public" becomes accessible — in the full sense of the word.
