3D printing : state of the art and future perspectives

In the last years, the development of 3D technologies applied to the field of Cultural Heritage (CH) has led to results of the utmost importance from the point of view of preservation, valorisation, communication and fruition of our assets. In particular, we experienced many interdisciplinary projects in which, thanks to the cooperation of different fields of research, incredible results have been obtained, through the technological collaboration of computer graphics and documentation, of industrial engineering and preservation and access of CH. This paper aims at drawing attention to the actual technologies in use for solid printing (digital fabrication) used for the realization of material copies, therefore tangible, of three-dimensional digital virtual models. Even though ulterior developments to these technologies are possibilities to be expected, the process of 3D printing has gradually gained levels of accuracy, which can nowadays be deemed as satisfying. This is even more true in the industrial field (from the manufacturing industry to the design industry), but also in other fields, such as the medical one, for example, for the realization of artificial limbs, and the CH field, which can benefit from new instruments for the restoration and preservation of cultural assets in museums. The metric characteristics of precision and accuracy of the model printed with 3D technology are the fundaments for everything concerning Geomatics, and have to be related with the same characteristics of the digital model obtained through the survey analysis. In other terms, the precision of the printed product must be evaluated in relation to the precision of the instruments used in the analysis. Thus, in the CH field there is the possibility of new systems of access, cataloguing and study, where the models, both virtual and tangible, represent the fundament of visualization and analysis of the form (also from the metric point of view) of each artefact of artistic and historical interest.