Real scale augmented reality. a novel paradigm for archaeological heritage fruition

3D contents have great potential in improving the communication and fruition of Cultural Heritage (CH). The visiting experience on an archaeological site or historical building can be improved by digital contents that help visitors to discover and learn how they once appeared. Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the technologies nowadays used for CH exploitation and it has the great quality of superimposing digital contents on elements of the reality. This paper shows a new interactive application on the archaeological site of Forum Sempronii: thanks to SLAM technology it allows the visitors to see several virtual reconstructions superimposed on the ruins walking around the site, so that they can see how anciently the roman city was. Great attention has been given to the creation of 3D contents: after the creation of high poly models they have been decimated and optimized in terms of number of polygons and textures in order to be fluently managed on mobile devices. The fruition of real scale contents on the real context increases immersive users’ experiences.