Museo dell’Opera del Duomo di Prato
Spatially-Aware Heritage Documentation
Spatially-Aware Heritage Documentation
Housed within the medieval cathedral complex of St. Stephen (built around 1320), the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo di Prato is defined by the relationship between sacred architecture and the objects it holds. Visitors move through the Romanesque cloister, its columns still carrying original polychrome decoration, down into subterranean vaults with archaeological remains, and into galleries housing the Chapel of St. Stephen beneath the cathedral sacristy.
Traditional cataloguing treats each artefact in isolation, losing its physical context and its place in the building’s history. This pilot is putting MNEME’s spatially-aware documentation to the test, building a geospatial mesh of the whole complex so that the intrinsic links between objects and the spaces they belong to are preserved, queryable, and visible to both the public and conservation professionals.
What MNEME brings
A laser-scanning and photogrammetric survey is capturing the cloister, the pulpit exterior, the underground vaults and connecting corridors at sub-centimeter accuracy. Individual artefacts, most notably the Donatello relief panels, are being scanned in high-resolution structured light and georeferenced against the same site-wide coordinate system as the architecture.
The Online Conservation Restoration Annotator (OCRA) lets conservation teams mark up deterioration, moisture ingress or past interventions directly on the 3D model. A WebXR augmented reality application then streams that georeferenced environment to on-site and remote devices, supporting overlays like a reconstruction of the pulpit in its original outdoor position.
The experience
The pilot’s public demonstration is planned around a “Prato Digital Heritage Week,” with both public and professional programming. In the cloister, a mixed-reality installation projects a life-size holographic view of the 15th-century cathedral aligned precisely with the standing columns; AR tablets let visitors see the pulpit reliefs reinstated on their original exterior façade, in period-accurate colour and gold leaf. A touch-screen kiosk draws the connection between Donatello’s pulpit and the painted ceiling motifs at Celje, tracing a shared artistic language across Europe.
Conservation professionals get a dedicated session with OCRA-enabled dashboards to review condition maps, propose interventions and model environmental stressors, while remote scholars explore the same 3D digital twin through the ECCCH web portal.
Goals for this pilot
80%+ of the accessible complex modelled in 3D; 90%+ geometric fidelity on artefact scans; 70%+ public participation in the mixed-reality installation; 20+ semantic links to Celje’s and AMTh’s collections; five or more conservators actively using OCRA; a 30% reduction in conservation planning time; AR environment load times under 3 seconds.