Beyond the picture

In this paper we present “Beyond the picture”, an interactive application developed for enjoying paintings by immersing visitors into them and exploiting natural interaction to navigate their contents. The visitor is provided with the capability to modify the viewpoint on the painting by changing its observation position. Visitor’s head movement are captured with a computer vision system and used to render a novel view of a realistic 3D reconstruction of the painting. Therefore, the display becomes a window on the picture, from which the user can navigate and inspect the rebuilt environment. This enables to immerse viewers into the representation of history fixed on canvas by the painter.