Los niveles de detalle en la reconstrucción virtual de núcleos urbanos históricos: estudio del caso de Vitoria-Gasteiz en el siglo XII

Abstract

Urban areas are an integral part of our cultural heritage. The places we inhabit evolve over time, and this transformation leaves enduring traces that persist to the present day. However, we often lack the necessary historical context to comprehend and appreciate this heritage fully. This lack of context underscores the need for dissemination strategies that align with legal protection and conservation efforts, to ensure that the citizenry to understand and, consequently, properly value this legacy.In recent decades, a discipline has emerged that seeks to graphically represent historical artifacts, buildings, and urban areas: the virtual reconstruction of heritage. This discipline facilitates an understanding of the past by digitally generating the necessary context for the enhancement of material heritage. Academic literature has gradually solidified this discipline through the contributions of researchers from several fields of knowledge, but the transfer of these developments to society is still far from being firmly established. Virtual reconstruction of these urban areas is contingent upon several factors: the availability of funding for its development, the access to enough information to ensure its historical accuracy, and the involvement of specialized teams with the specific technical and theoretical knowledge. A solution for these contingences involves the creation of virtual reconstructions with different levels of detail. This means the generation of images that depict historical urban areas with different resolutions, ranging from schematic to hyperrealistic.The main objective of this PhD dissertation is to analyse the relationship between funding, information, human resources, and levels of detail through a combined methodology. A comprehensive review of the virtual reconstruction of heritage in Spain has been conducted, and a virtual reconstruction project of 12th century Vitoria-Gasteiz has been carried out from these results. This reconstruction has been used as a basis for a mixed qualitative and quantitative statistical analysis, from which practical solutions have been defined to promote the virtual reconstruction of historical urban areas. Specific categorization of levels of detail has been designed for virtual heritage reconstruction, along with guidelines and a decision-making protocol to facilitate the pre-production of these projects.