Marconi Station AR

The radio center in Pisa / Coltan Guglielmo Marconi - AR and VR App

In the campaigns around Pisa, in the area named Coltano, there are the modern ruins of an important site, not a simple house with the roof fallen inside, but the headquarters of past scientific activities and the base of a radio station. Once more, not a common radio station, but the very first radio station, where Guglielmo Marconi (Nobel in Physic in 1909), made the first radio transmissions and the first significant steps in our technological age. The radio station was opened in 1911 and continued its activities until the World War two.

The buildings on the area and the great antennas are now destroyed or in ruins, the house of the Marconi’s headquarters is left to itself by general negligence and is reduced to poor walls, while the antennas were destroyed during the war, but their massive concrete bases are still in place.

After a first general survey of the area with the 3D laser scanner documentation of the ruins and the georeferencing of the antenna basements, this personal research started to develop reconstructed 3D digital models from the on site data and from the historical archives. The aim of the project is the development of a working augmented reality model of the place, capable to give at least an image in place of what is lost and what should be worth of some recovery. In this contribution it will be presented the state of development of the project, the procedures and methods adopted to produce a shareble documentation of this neglected mile stone of our age.

Giorgio VERDIANI | Carlo GIRA | Andrea PISANI

(Dipartimento di Architettura, Florence University, Florence, Italy)