THE EUROPEAN RESEARCH NIGHT: NEW WAYS FOR COMMUNICATING SCIENCE WITH ICT AND VIDEOMAPPING

Abstract. Thrilling the society toward science and research is not trivial. Albeit the “academic industry” lavishes many efforts to spread its results not only among the insiders but to the whole mankind, the importance of sharing the knowledge of research is seldom a priority. The European Researcher Night is probably the most important EU action trying to overcome this limitation, putting altogether researcher from different disciplines to show their findings through stands, short communications and events. Within this framework, the event able to attracts citizens is the video mapping projection. In this article is described a multi-disciplinary process that makes use of a photogrammetric survey as an accurate source for video projection mapping. While well-established geomatics technologies (e.g. laser scanning and photogrammetry) paves the way for the virtual reconstruction of the architecture, they are even essential to perform analysis and studies which enables visual artist or art historians to tell the story of a building in a new and fascinating way. Besides the realization of the visual mapping and a critical discussion over the procedure that has been used to translate a 3D model in a visual storytelling of the building, the article also describes an innovative way that has been set up for the management of the whole SHARPER event. The system is app-based and was designed to allow the visitors to interact with the event directly from their smartphones; several active sensors have been displaced among the city, asking the user to search for virtual owls and to catch them by answering some questions, engaging the people by exploiting the gamification paradigm. This latter has been stressed further, since the video projection was conceived as a competition between the students of the Master degree course in Engineering-Architecture. Through the application, the attendant to the visual mapping where thus enabled to vote his/her favourite video in real-time.