Virtual Cultural Heritage. Nuovi codici comunicativi per la fruizione dei beni culturali

Experimental system have been developed to introduce new ways of enjoying cultural heritage using digital media. Most of this applications are aimed at creating online database or virtual environments, that allow free access to information and that helps to spread culture. There are many and different applications in this field, such as virtual museums that are replicas of existing museums, web-museums that are able to communicate specific cultural contents or virtual environments where you can collect information to produce new contents. Over the past few years, the communicative context has changed, the evolution of ICT has caused a change in the way of communicating and the result is a different way of learning. This change introduces two news in the communicative context, interactivity and 3D modeling, and so we have to develop a new communication code. The web 2.0 has introduced the possibility to generate a virtual environments where you can freely take information and where you can construct new contents, this is like a knowledge factory where we can construct new communication systems and we can define new communication codes. An interdisciplinary work is needed to construct these new communication structures, in particular the field of representation have to deal the important questions: the visualization and the interfaces design.