Digital survey and museums: useful tools and less useful tools for humanity 5.0

Digital tools for survey and documentation today offer options of significant interest and great potential for any museum setup. For management, protection, and dissemination, creating a digital copy of the collections is a crucial step that interests permanent and temporary exhibitions, museum collections, and entire museum locations. Thanks to their progressive popularization over the last twenty years, the tools to carry out this transformation are now available to heritage managers, scholars, and more and more often to every visitor in front of what is exposed. From 3D laser scanner units to contemporary photogrammetry, to components implemented in personal devices, the ease of producing digital copies is now getting faster and faster and is progressively improving in terms of quality. The many recent experiences confirm the widespread digital innovation in the reality of museums and collections (Collotti et al., 2021). In the context of the digital innovations at the base of humanity 5.0, that is defined as “a society of intelligence,” in which physical space and cyberspace are strongly integrated” (Salgues, 2018). The renewal of a museum design needs to consider the digital innovations at all levels, from the tools allowing the passage from reality to digital to the digitalization of museum architectural spaces or museum collections.