Beyond the smart city. The Urban Digital Twin for the augmented city: the Vox Hortus project

The Urban Digital Twin (UDT) represents an innovative new dimension for urban planning capable, not only, to replay the corresponding physical twin in all its properties but also and specially, to implement the interaction with our cities through the addition of any type of information content. Thanks to the tools of City Information Modeling and Augmented Reality technologies, the information content of the UDT can be interrogated, updated and shared among planners and political decision makers, and with citizens. Based on the type of information content, the UDT makes various planning actions possible and allows to start of different perceptive experiences, such as the prefiguration of urban transformations; the virtual recombination of historical heritage; the augmented use of the city with a new way to polarize tourist flows as well. With regard to this capability of the UDT, the present work intends to describe how it is possible to regenerate an urban context by using augmented reality. The case study is focused on one of the most iconic spaces inside the city of Benevento: the Hortus Conclusus. This little open-air space, inside the inner city, contains the artworks of the famous modern artist Mimmo Paladino that are been geolocated inside a project called Vox Hortus which allow the visitors to listen to the voice of the masterpieces through an augmented reality audio application.