Digital museums: meaning, use, phenomena and ideas for the virtual twins adventure

In our time, the progressive digitalization of “everything” is moving the society to new behaviors and new paradigms in finding information, learning, visiting a museum, understanding artworks, and taking choices. The transformation is a part of the Industry 4.0 evolution and of the progressive advent of the Society 5.0, even if these definitions may appear a little rhetoric, it is impossible to Ignore, negate or neglect the expansion of the digital layer all over the cultural environments, the built heritage and on any kind of collections from those made of simple items, to those grouping rare masterpieces. At the base of any process of digital communication, creation of catalogue, development of a virtual environment and so on, there is the creation of a digital version of the real. The progressive increment of the accuracy of the digitalization process, even if yet far from perfection, brought the formulation of a very practical definition, the one of the “digital twin”. The digital twin is obviously the digital version of something real, existing, or just designed/imagined and next to be real in the following processes. This term seems to fit well any operation creating a digital copy of any manmade artefact, from the building to the artwork, creating the needed base for study, analysis, simulation, optimizing the level of details and the communication accordingly the aims of the project in which the digital twin production is included. In the museums, the recent development of very affordable ways to pass back from the digital twin to a physical copy has opened a series of possibilities that are worth of attention to any designer and cultural exhibition planner/manager, while they offer wide opportunities in presenting and communicating the collections as well as single items. In this contribution, a series of case studies, from the direct use of virtual digital models to the reproduction with scale variations of large statues and architectures will be explored in the intention of creating a taxonomy and some main guidelines in the use and development of the digital twins for cultural heritage and artwork collections. In this process a specific attention will be due to the digitalization strategies, considering both the active solutions (i.e., the classic 3D laser scanner) to the passive ones (i.e., Photogrammetry), evaluating not only the accuracy and the massive data gathering, but the overall workflow and its compliance with professional and practical needs.