AbstractThe birth of virtual reality marked a new path forward and also gave a fresh view of reality,
allowing alternative ‘readings’ of cultural heritage. This new way of representation and simulation was
soon associated with the term virtual environment, used to indicate those interactive three-dimensional
models that could be navigated and that simulated a place, building, or synthetic representation scheme in
real time. A virtual environment is like a “microscope for the mind” that allows you to elaborate amplified
projections of the material world, to “look beyond” simple appearances and to make logical connections
between elements grouped together. In recent years, virtual environments have been greeted positively
by the public and scholars, testified by the quantity of thematic conferences on the subject of Virtual
Archaeology. Despite this, there are still many contradictions found in the varying terms and the diverse
aims of the developing disciplines that gravitate around the field of virtual reality such as Cultural Virtual
Environment, Virtual Restoration, Virtual Archaeology, Enhanced Reality, and Mixed Reality. The spread
of new media has upset the traditional systems of communication such as books, television, radio and
even the roles of some cultural stakeholder. With this in mind, the role of virtual heritage also consists in
transmitting information using the language and cognitive metaphors used in video-games, considering
these as cultural paradigms for a form of communication that is freed from the classic rules of elite
culture. It is quite frequent to find projects of digital promotion for monuments that are characterised by
difficulty of access, or for objects that have been taken from their original context. One solution to enhance
the accessibility of those sites is certainly the use of some visual computing technologies which without
presuming to be the ultimate answer to the problems posed, try to offer communications tools that permit
an effective support to the visit.