Visualizing Hypotheses: Practical Handling of Uncertainty in Digital 3D Models

Digital 3D reconstructions of cultural artefacts, historical characters and architecture contribute to a better understanding of cultural heritage. In the broad user community, experts from various fields such as architecture, archaeology, art history, paleontology, forensic anthropology, and museology generate 3D reconstructions in order to gain insight into no longer existing evidence. Therefore, such reconstructions are a critical tool for the “translation” of scientific data into visualizations, which make these accessible to the expert community and the general public. It is important to keep in mind that uncertainties are part of nearly all digital 3D models of historical objects due to a lack of sources, ambiguities, interpretation of sources etc. Therefore, strategies have to be found to cope with uncertainties, to visualize them and to communicate them to the audience