Digital epigraphic heritage made simple: an Android app for exploring 3D Roman inscriptions

Abstract

Spain keeps an exceptional epigraphic heritage, dated from the Roman civilization, that integrates thousands of Latin inscriptions nowadays disseminated along the Iberian peninsula. For many purposes such as education, innovation, cataloging, study and dissemination of this type of historical documentation, a clear demand of placing all this epigraphic heritage into modern 3D graphics, internet and mobile devices is increasing. We present the novel 'Epigraphia 3D' for handheld devices, a native Android app for exploring a total of 60 Roman inscriptions from the National Museum of Roman Art (Merida, Badajoz). The work emphasizes the 3D nature feature for navigating through the inscriptions, by using Glob3 Mobile, an open source GIS framework for visualizing the 3D inscriptions. Besides, an error analysis of the simplified models is tackled.