Recording with laser scanning of Santo Tomas Royal Monastery: a travel into the past in honour of Christopher Columbus

Resumen

The documentation and release of Cultural Heritage represents, mainly in Castile (Spain), a basic tool for the promotion and development of the historic and cultural traces of our Knowledge Society. The diversity of our Cultural Legacy together with the difficult access to some emblematic areas, due to geographic dispersion or deficient communications, produce an initial motivation to emphasize the importance of extending this information from the general public to different experts. This paper presents an overview about the performances of TIDOP research group (Information Technologies applied to Cultural Heritage Recording) in a project for the recording of Santo Tomas Royal Monastery using laser scanner technology. This project is framed in an international exhibition well known as ‘Las Dos Orillas’, which aims to commemorate the V centenary of Christopher Columbus death, through a travel into the past that combines artistic, ethnographic and anthropologic aspects in a meeting of two worlds and two cultures. Under all this influence of cultures and ways of life, the TIDOP research group contributes in this synergic and multidisciplinary context, by means of the recording through the technology of laser scanner, in one of the more important monuments related with the Catholic Kings reign: Santo Tomas Royal Monastery, focusing in the development of a methodology that allow to integrate laser scanning and digital imaging. Particularly, the work accomplished at Santo Tomas Royal Monastery, consists in the documentation, modeling and interactive visualization combining laser scanning and digital imaging of: the main facade of the Monastery, the Chorus, the three emblematic Cloisters and the Oriental Museum. In this last case, a specific approach based on fish-eye images and panoramas creation has been developed allowing to recreate a virtual tour of the museum. This joint event for the exchange and sharing of know-how in the areas of Cultural Heritage and Information Technology focusing on e-Documentation and Computer Graphics constitutes a great opportunity to describe our project methodology opening this important vestige of the Renascence to different experts and to the public in general