Immersive Insights: Exploring Pompeii’s Lost Homes Through Augmented Reality Reconstructions

Five minutes into a Pompeii virtual tour, it becomes clear that we’re not only navigating an ancient site—we’re entering a conversation about how memory is built, preserved, and experienced. Among its ruined homes, where kitchens, shrines, and courtyards speak in partial phrases, archaeologists and developers are stitching together new ways of sensing the past. Through techniques such as 3d reconstruction Pompeii models and immersive storytelling, platforms like Altair4 Multimedia and Flyover Zone are transforming heritage from static exhibits to interactive encounters.

Yet as we step into these reconstructions, questions emerge: what stories are being digitally restored, and which presences remain obscured? Using augmented reality in Pompeii not only reanimates domestic architecture—it also risks repeating silences unless critically guided.

This article offers a comparative lens on how digital interventions reframe domestic life in Pompeii. Each section juxtaposes analogue interpretation—wall painting analysis, spatial stratigraphy, household archaeology—with real-world AR reconstructions of Pompeii. At the core of this exploration is a tension between visual allure and historical responsibility.

While virtual reality in Pompeii homes can offer moments of sensory clarity, they must be met with methodological caution. In reconstructing these spaces, we are not simply building rooms—we’re scripting a version of the past that will shape public understanding for decades.

Fractured Domesticities: Reading the Ruins of Pompeii’s Everyday Life

Archaeology in Pompeii begins with dust and fragments. Excavated rooms often arrive at us roofless, disjointed, and pierced by centuries of looting, weather, and intervention. Yet within these gaps, the outlines of lived domesticity persist: an atrium’s impluvium, the remains of frescoed walls, and the narrowing transitions between spaces that once defined family roles. The House of the Faun, one of Pompeii’s largest residences, offers a complex example of spatial hierarchy that segregated elite leisure from servile labour. Mapping such homes requires not just top-down plans but close attention to scale, orientation, and symbolic thresholds.

The House of the Vettii, reopened after decades of conservation, presents a vivid palimpsest of luxury and status performed through decoration. Erotic frescoes line the walls of the triclinium while Dionysian iconography spills across the lararium, suggesting a calculated choreography of power and display. This home, possibly owned by freedmen, complicates simplistic readings of class and identity in Roman domestic settings. Its visual language moves beyond moralist assumptions and toward a layered reading of aspiration and performance. Feminist archaeologists such as Penelope Allison have highlighted how such domestic environments must be read through gendered labour patterns as much as aesthetic design.

Traditional interpretations of Pompeian houses have privileged male-centred narratives of public versus private space. Yet the blurring of these boundaries—where clients enter, where food is prepared, where intimacy is performed—demands more dynamic frameworks. Spaces like the cubiculum or the peristyle garden carried different meanings depending on the gender, status, or enslaved condition of the occupant. Textual records are scarce, so spatial analysis becomes a proxy for recovering everyday routines. In this way, architecture becomes both an artefact and an archive.

In analogue scholarship, ground plans and axial drawings often abstract domesticity into clean, linear sequences. But lived experience seldom moves in straight lines. A woman drawing water from the cistern or a boy sweeping the atrium might occupy thresholds rather than interiors, tracing invisible routines across these sites. The Pompeii Forum Project and the Household Studies Research Project have tried to animate such microhistories through in situ analysis. Their work emphasises how the absence of furniture, textiles, or human presence must be acknowledged as a structural element.

While artefacts can suggest function, spatial readings require interpretive caution. A loom weight in a room does not make it a workshop; a statue of Venus does not confirm feminine occupancy. Scholars like Ray Laurence and Shelley Hales remind us that symbolic reading must be grounded in context rather than assumption. This is particularly true when engaging with elite houses where decor may have functioned aspirationally. Digital tools now complicate these interpretations further.

Analogue and digital methodologies increasingly coexist. Projects like the INCEPTION Project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, integrate photogrammetric scans with annotated interpretations. These scans allow researchers to revisit spatial questions from multiple angles, with metadata linked to specific textures and elevation models. As a result, 3d reconstruction of Pompeii platforms becomes not only a visual but a critical apparatus. They challenge static interpretation and invite revisitation.

However, digital modelling is not neutral. Every texture added, every gap filled, reflects a decision—sometimes artistic, sometimes speculative. The temptation to produce seamless, polished renderings can risk masking archaeological uncertainty. In the House of the Cryptoporticus, for example, debates over wall paint chronology continue even as VR models present a fixed narrative. Critical users must remain aware of where the evidence ends and the hypothesis begins.

Still, reconstructions offer opportunities to visualise previously inaccessible perspectives. Walkthroughs in virtual reality in Pompeii homes enable scholars to reassess movement patterns, room adjacency, and the framing of visual art. When paired with gender-aware spatial theory, these walkthroughs reveal new insights into how space choreographed social relations. The potential for inclusive digital storytelling lies in these small recalibrations. What once seemed marginal—a narrow corridor, a service entrance—can now be re-centred.

The rise of digital interventions does not diminish the value of analogue observation. Rather, it intensifies the need for rigorous comparative analysis. A cracked mosaic still holds interpretive weight even when viewed through a headset. Digital reconstructions must therefore be accountable to the fragmented material they reference. The challenge lies not in making ruins whole, but in making their incompleteness meaningful.

As we begin to walk these homes again through new media, the question is not only how to explore Pompeii through augmented reality, but also what kind of Pompeii we are reconstructing. Whose movement, whose memory, whose gaze are we encoding? By acknowledging the domestic as political, these reconstructions can resist the lure of spectacle. Instead, they might offer textured, inclusive glimpses into past lives—glimpses attentive to both silence and survival. Here, the past becomes something more than scenery: it becomes a space of reckoning.

Digital Conservation Dilemmas: Preservation or Projection?

Preserving Pompeii has always involved intervention, but digital conservation introduces a new set of dilemmas. As heritage stewards turn to 3d reconstruction in Pompeii, they confront questions of authenticity, provenance, and ethical representation. Digital tools allow for extraordinary visual fidelity, yet they can also flatten nuance, rendering complex histories into overly smooth narratives. What appears as preservation may be projection: an imagining shaped more by present-day sensibilities than by archaeological caution. This tension sits at the heart of Pompeii’s digital transformation.

The conservation of physical structures often prioritises stability and minimal intervention; digital preservation, by contrast, can veer toward hyper-real restoration. Walls are recoloured, mosaics completed, and voids filled—not always with marked speculation. While these reconstructions may excite the public, they risk obscuring the fragmentary nature of the archaeological record. The ethics of these decisions matter deeply, especially when representing domestic spaces, where gender, status, and labour shaped everyday life in ways still being uncovered. A wall’s reconstructed paintwork is never just an aesthetic choice; it’s a hypothesis with narrative consequences.

Technical innovation has enabled archaeologists to visualise data in previously impossible ways. High-resolution LIDAR scans, photogrammetry, and point-cloud modelling now underpin many digital reconstructions at sites like the Casa di Octavius Quartio. But beyond the technical, what frameworks guide these visualisations? Who decides what counts as “accurate,” and what does accuracy mean in a space layered with centuries of ruin, reuse, and restoration? These are ethical as much as methodological questions—ones that must be confronted with transparency.

The “Time Machine” project, for example, ambitiously seeks to reconstruct entire European cities across time, including Pompeii, using historical documents and AI modelling. While its scope is impressive, critics have flagged the risk of privileging dominant narratives—those best documented—over marginal voices left out of archives. Similarly, platforms like Sketchfab and Matterport, though democratising access, often prioritise visual polish over interpretive openness. As models circulate globally, the authority they project can harden into perceived truth. The danger is less in their use than in the absence of contextual scaffolding.

In response, some projects have foregrounded ethical reflexivity and community involvement. GlobalXplorer°, launched by archaeologist Sarah Parcak, uses satellite imagery and crowdsourcing to protect heritage sites from looting, placing conservation in the hands of citizen scientists. Though not site-specific to Pompeii, its participatory model offers a critical counterpoint to top-down digital reconstructions. Likewise, AfricaVR, a Nairobi-based collective, creates immersive VR experiences of cultural heritage sites across the continent, often foregrounding oral histories and community narratives. These initiatives show that digital heritage can be participatory, grounded, and ethically responsive.

Pompeii’s digital futures could learn from such models. Current reconstructions often remain anchored in institutional silos—academic labs or corporate-funded research. While expertise is essential, so too is the inclusion of broader publics, especially those with heritage connections, diasporic ties, or alternate epistemologies. Could a future Pompeii AR app include user-generated annotations, flagging contested interpretations? Might school groups or descendant communities be invited to co-curate interpretive overlays?

Such shifts would require more than interface tweaks—they call for rethinking conservation as a dialogic rather than declarative process. To conserve is not merely to fix or freeze, but to hold open the possibility of reinterpretation. In digital form, this means building tools that show their scaffolding, inviting users to see where data ends and imagination begins. Transparent interfaces might mark speculative reconstructions in different hues or toggle between multiple scholarly interpretations. These design choices become ethical choices, shaping not just what we see but how we understand the past.

Equally important is acknowledging what digital cannot conserve: temperature, humidity, texture, and the quiet weight of time worn into stone. A rendered villa may be visually precise, but it cannot recreate the sensory or emotional register of standing in a ruin at dusk. That gap between representation and reality should not be seen as a flaw to overcome, but a space to honour. It reminds us that preservation is not the same as replication. And in that space, we might find a more honest relationship to the past.

Augmented reality in Pompeii need not strive for totality. Instead, it can become a medium for layered understanding—one that combines visual detail with ethical clarity and public engagement. Projects that share their sources, admit their limits, and invite critique can move beyond conservation-as-display toward conservation-as-dialogue. The future of Pompeii’s homes does not lie in perfect reconstructions, but in generous, questioning ones. In holding history gently, digital tools might finally serve both memory and imagination.

Walls that Speak Twice: Visual Storytelling and the Semiotics of Surface

Pompeii’s walls were never silent. Even in ruin, they speak through pigment residues, brushstroke shadows, and the fragments of mythic scenes etched in faded reds and ochres. Wall paintings served not merely as decoration, but as devices of narrative control—projecting ideals, identities, and moral boundaries across the domestic sphere. From the Fourth Style frescoes of the House of the Tragic Poet to the Dionysian friezes of the Villa of the Mysteries, these surfaces structured how bodies moved, gazed, and performed within rooms. Their iconography choreographed the domestic stage, embedding social scripts into every threshold and triclinium.

Yet reading these walls requires more than art-historical fluency; it demands an attentiveness to power. As scholars like Bettina Bergmann have shown, Pompeian paintings often embedded complex spatial illusions that played with depth, perspective, and enclosure. These trompe l’oeil effects weren’t neutral—they structured who felt visible, who felt watched, and who disappeared. A woman weaving beneath the eyes of painted gods, or a child playing beside a wall of mythic violence, might experience these images less as ornament and more as atmosphere. The semiotics of surface thus enfolded daily life in a visual language of discipline and desire.

Digital platforms now attempt to reanimate these surfaces, layering fresco textures into 3d reconstruction Pompeii models for immersive tours. While such renderings can enhance visual legibility, they risk aestheticising rupture, smoothing over cracks, voids, and interpretive doubts. In the House of the Ceii, for example, digitally restored hunting scenes project a pastoral order that may obscure the home’s complex socio-political messages. Without annotations or alternate readings, these reconstructions can reinforce singular, often elite, narratives. The wall becomes a screen, flattening history into visual certainty.

However, some projects resist this flattening. The DECOR Project, for instance, anchors digital reconstructions in pigment analysis and multispectral imaging, foregrounding evidence rather than conjecture. Their models allow users to toggle between original traces and proposed restorations, revealing the interpretive scaffolding beneath each scene. This transparency is crucial: it reminds viewers that visual storytelling is always curated, always contingent. In doing so, it opens interpretive space for feminist, queer, and decolonial readings. It also encourages users to see walls not as finished products but as ongoing negotiations with time.

Walls are never just surfaces—they are thresholds of memory. In Pompeii, they held the echoes of meals, arguments, songs, and prayers, even as they displayed imperial myths. Reconstructing them digitally is an act of translation as much as representation. The question becomes not whether we can restore their images, but how to render their meanings legible without closure. When digital storytelling foregrounds multiplicity rather than mastery, walls can begin to speak twice—and more truthfully.

The Villa Reframed: Augmented Reality at the Villa of Mysteries

The Villa of the Mysteries, perched on the outskirts of Pompeii, has long captivated scholars with its enigmatic fresco cycle. These Dionysian scenes—often read as an initiation ritual for women—blend myth, gesture, and architecture into a theatrical choreography of presence. In traditional scholarship, interpretations hinge on style, mythography, and the symbolic placement of figures within the triclinium. Yet new digital initiatives like NextPompeii have layered augmented reality over this space, offering multisensory walkthroughs that render the walls with speculative colour, movement, and sound. These reconstructions invite viewers not only to observe the villa but to inhabit it, raising fresh questions about affect, authorship, and audience.

Analogue readings of the frescoes stress iconographic ambiguity. Are these scenes literary or lived? Is the woman being whipped or merely startled? The fresco’s power lies in its narrative elasticity, allowing for multiple gendered readings. Feminist critics have warned against flattening this ambiguity through moralising or voyeuristic lenses. With augmented reality in Pompeii, these interpretive tensions become even more charged: movement, audio, and animation can overdetermine readings, privileging one narrative arc over another. To digitise the Dionysiac is to choreograph ambiguity into sequence.

The NextPompeii AR overlay, for instance, allows users to toggle interpretive layers—from restoration hypotheses to scholarly debates. In one view, the figures shimmer with restored polychrome, while in another, users can follow annotations from recent excavation notes. This modularity is a strength, enabling contextual choice rather than a singular script. Yet it also raises stakes: who decides which voices are encoded? Whose interpretation becomes the default setting?

Here, the ethics of immersive reconstruction intersect with the politics of expertise. Unlike museum plaques or academic publications, AR environments engage through experience rather than exposition. The viewer becomes a participant, navigating a version of the past that feels both immediate and authored. In this sense, augmented heritage is not merely a supplement to analogue knowledge—it’s a restructuring of epistemology. What we know becomes tied to what we can virtually perform.

Conservationists have long warned that visual reproduction can produce false familiarity. The aura of the fresco, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, risks erosion when endlessly replicated. AR, however, adds a twist: it doesn’t merely reproduce the image but rebuilds its context. A room can be re-lit, repopulated, and reframed through speculative lenses. The danger lies not in duplication but in erasure—when digital presence replaces physical absence too neatly, when uncertainty is plastered over with confidence.

To counter this, hybrid models are emerging. Projects like VIRTU@L POMPEII pair AR reconstructions with QR-linked footnotes and metadata trails. Users can “click into” a moment, not just walk through it. This approach retains the speculative thrill of immersion while foregrounding provenance and debate. For the Villa of the Mysteries, it means viewers can compare mural interpretations across decades, seeing how scholarly paradigms—psychoanalytic, ritualist, feminist—shape what they see.

These tools also reframe domestic intimacy. Where once the villa’s grandeur dominated discussions, AR walkthroughs highlight tactile elements: the rough grain of tufa, the echo of a closed room, the imagined scent of a frescoed chamber. Such sensory reconstructions can illuminate social dynamics otherwise left implicit. Who cleaned these walls? Who has never entered this room? The domestic becomes porous—part memory, part interface.

At their best, augmented experiences make us linger rather than consume. In the Villa of the Mysteries, AR can slow our gaze, prompt revisitation, and foreground the labour of interpretation. It can also reinforce inclusivity by embedding marginalised narratives directly into the user’s path. One test overlay, developed by a student team, follows a fictionalised enslaved woman’s route through the villa, based on excavation data and comparative ethnography. Though provisional, it gestures toward a more ethically engaged digital heritage.

Still, inclusivity must extend beyond content to design. AR interfaces must consider accessibility: haptic feedback for blind users, multilingual captions, and toggled pacing for neurodiverse visitors. Pompeii’s homes were stratified spaces; our reconstructions should not repeat that exclusivity. The politics of design are inseparable from the politics of the past.

Ultimately, the Villa reframed through AR becomes a case study in interpretive layering. Like the frescoes themselves, it resists single meanings. To reconstruct Pompeii’s domestic worlds ethically means accepting complexity, not smoothing it over with tech, but extending it through responsible imagination. In doing so, we approach the digital not as a mirror of the past, but as a scaffold for questioning it. Also offer benefits like free hotel nights, discounted rates at luxury properties, and access to airport lounges. Travel rewards points can be a game-changer, allowing you to upgrade your travel experience without spending extra cash.

Intimacies Reimagined: Gender, Domesticity and AR in Pompeii

Domestic life in Pompeii was never neutral—it was coded, divided, and deeply gendered. Archaeological evidence from kitchens, storage rooms, and atria reflects complex spatial hierarchies shaped by patriarchy and enslavement. Feminist readings have long resisted the reduction of women to muses or matrons frozen in frescoes. Instead, they trace presence in wear patterns on thresholds, in spindle whorls left near benches, and in the architecture of visibility and retreat. These traces speak to lived domesticity—its routines, tensions, and care-labour.

AR reconstructions of Pompeii have the potential to foreground these nuances when designed with critical intent. Projects like DOMUS (Digitally Optimising the Mapping of Urban Spaces) have begun integrating gender-based spatial analysis into digital models. By mapping traffic flows, sightlines, and object placements, DOMUS challenges assumptions about who moved freely within Roman homes. When layered into augmented reality in Pompeii tours, such data can shift users’ perspectives—inviting them to inhabit the house not as a generic visitor but as a particular body navigating constraint. This approach enriches what we know about power and intimacy in the ancient world.

Take the House of the Vettii, often celebrated for its lavish erotic frescoes. Rather than presenting these images as mere aesthetic indulgences, feminist scholars highlight their function in elite self-fashioning, using female bodies to signal status and dominance. Virtual reality in Pompeii homes can reinforce or resist this reading. When presented uncritically, immersive tours risk reproducing objectifying gazes. But when these reconstructions include feminist annotations, they invite questions about consent, spectatorship, and gendered labour in elite hospitality spaces.

In contrast, the House of the Baker foregrounds working-class domestic rhythms—bread ovens, mills, storage jars, and reused spaces. AR tools that simulate ambient sound, lighting, and footfall densities can make visible the sensorial environments of labour. These reconstructions challenge elite-centric narratives by restoring value to ordinary work and the people who performed it. They also highlight how labour, gender, and spatial control intersected in Pompeii’s daily life. Such perspectives decentralise spectacle and refocus attention on intimate economies.

Gendered movement through the domus also reveals much about bodily autonomy. In many homes, the peristyle offered a rare space of seclusion or ritual for women and enslaved people. 3d reconstruction of Pompeii models that simulate time-of-day lighting and door closures can restore these shifting privacy thresholds. This helps users grasp the rhythms of retreat and interruption—when care could be offered, or denied. Here, augmented reconstructions can recover the emotional contours of space, not just its measurements.

Reimagining Pompeian homes through a feminist lens also means attending to non-elite and enslaved presences. Their experiences rarely leave textual records but persist in architectural improvisations—blocked doorways, added partitions, traces of cohabitation. Projects like VIDI (Visualising the Domestic Interior) attempt to honour these voices by reconstructing everyday use rather than static beauty. Their models invite users to dwell in ambiguity: to wonder who slept on the floor, who scrubbed the basin, who lingered near the hearth. Through this, Pompeii virtual tour platforms begin to challenge the silence of the historical record.

Queer theory also opens new readings of Pompeii’s domesticity, particularly around spatial intimacy and visibility. Frescoes in the House of the Centenary depict same-sex desire without moralising, suggesting alternate understandings of domestic pleasure and kinship. Augmented and virtual reality in Pompeii homes can create interpretive overlays that include queer readings and routes. These reconstructions resist heteronormative assumptions and open the domus to wider narratives of affection and embodiment. Through such inclusions, digital heritage becomes a space for justice as much as curiosity.

It is essential to acknowledge that augmented heritage is always shaped by the choices of its designers. The filters applied, the perspectives prioritised, and the pathways mapped all influence the user’s understanding. When heritage professionals centre feminist and queer ethics in their AR storytelling, they refuse the illusion of neutrality. Instead, they allow visitors to move through a world textured by care, struggle, and contradiction. This practice refuses erasure and embraces critical reconstruction.

The house, then, becomes more than a backdrop—it becomes a participant in feminist historiography. Through augmented reality in Pompeii, we are not simply looking in; we are walking through questions. Who mattered? Who laboured? Who watched and who was watched? AR becomes a method of witnessing, and with that comes responsibility.
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Ethics of Immersion: Power, Presence, and the Politics of Reconstruction

In every Pompeii virtual tour, choices about what to show, how to show it, and who is imagined as the viewer shape the ethical terrain of digital heritage. Immersion is never neutral—it pulls us into reconstructed spaces with persuasive force, often cloaking interpretive leaps in visual cohesion. These technologies can re-centre elite narratives, omit marginalised voices, and erase archaeological ambiguity in favour of spectacle. While augmented reality in Pompeii brings lost homes vividly to life, it also invites scrutiny: whose histories are being resurrected, and who remains digitally displaced? Immersion, when unexamined, risks becoming an aesthetic of erasure.

The power of presence—being able to walk through a Roman atrium or view a lararium in situ—relies on emotional impact as much as data fidelity. This presence, however, is often constructed for presumed audiences: Western, sighted, able-bodied, and affluent. Such assumptions raise critical issues about accessibility, inclusion, and the export of cultural heritage through digital means. For many, especially descendants of colonised or displaced communities, these reconstructions offer little reflection of their stake in global heritage debates. Reframing the viewer not as a consumer but as a co-interpreter shifts this power dynamic.

Projects like Altair4 Multimedia have foregrounded technical realism, but not always social nuance. The absence of enslaved bodies, labouring women, or transient figures in 3d reconstruction Pompeii models sanitises domestic life into curated tableaux. Without interpretive prompts, users may assume that what they see is all there is, reinforcing myths of Roman order and aesthetic harmony. It is here that immersive design intersects with ideology, often invisibly. A feminist lens calls for a reckoning with what—and who—is omitted.

Recent interventions have started to challenge this by embedding polyvocal narratives into virtual reconstructions. The Open Pompeii initiative, for instance, experiments with layered soundscapes and multilingual narration to diversify engagement. These approaches invite users to hear whispered prayers in kitchens or the echo of sandals on mosaic floors, enriching the emotional register of virtual tours. Sound, unlike sight, resists total control—its resonance suggests presence without closure. In this way, immersion becomes not just a tool for replication, but a medium of multiplicity.

The question of ethics extends to the labour behind the screen. Digitisation teams, many from underpaid or precarious positions, often remain uncredited in final projects. Additionally, the software and hardware used to generate virtual reality in Pompeii homes are frequently embedded in extractive supply chains. Ethical immersion must consider not only the reconstructed past but the material conditions of its production. Who builds the digital city, and who benefits from its circulation? These are questions of both visibility and justice.

Transparency is a key principle in ethical heritage visualisation. Projects like the INCEPTION Project have included metadata trails and colour-coded reconstructions that distinguish evidence from hypothesis. These choices empower users to question what they see and to recognise the labour of interpretation. By showing gaps, doubts, and revisions, such reconstructions resist the myth of the omniscient model. This transparency builds trust and fosters critical thinking.

Another ethical concern lies in the exportability of Pompeii’s reconstructed homes. As models are used in classrooms, apps, and cultural products worldwide, their interpretive frameworks gain normative power. If the digital home becomes a canonical Pompeii, it must also bear the burden of representation responsibly. Integrating plural perspectives—queer readings, migrant imaginaries, material absences—becomes not just a corrective but a creative imperative. The digital can either flatten or amplify Pompeii’s complexity.

Crucially, accessibility cannot be an afterthought. While many platforms now include multilingual options, few offer audio description, captioned content, or sensory alternatives for blind, deaf, or neurodivergent users. Inclusive immersion means designing for varied ways of sensing and knowing, not simply adding features post hoc. The Louvre’s tactile approach to inclusion offers one real-world analogue that digital projects might emulate. A truly ethical Pompeii virtual tour invites not only different bodies into the space, but also different ways of inhabiting it.

The politics of reconstruction are entangled with memory, authority, and futurity. As we model Roman homes in ever-higher resolution, we must ask what kind of cultural memory we’re curating—and for whom. Are we scripting nostalgia for an imagined imperial past, or fostering nuanced inquiry into its contradictions? A digital atrium can dazzle the eyes while still obscuring the footsteps of cooks, enslaved children, or guests whose names were never recorded. Ethical immersion dares to trace those footsteps, too.

Ultimately, immersive technologies must move beyond wonder and toward accountability. The power to reanimate Pompeii comes with the responsibility to honour its absences and tensions. This means resisting totalising narratives and instead cultivating interpretive humility. Exploring Pompeii through augmented reality should not only reconstruct walls and floors, but also open space for ethical pause, discomfort, and deeper questioning. Only then can digital heritage become not just a mirror of the past, but a prism for justice.

Embodied Encounters: Experiencing Pompeii’s Domestic Spaces through Augmented Reality

Augmented reality does not simply add digital overlays; it invites us to inhabit historical space differently. In Pompeii, this shift from observation to embodied encounter reframes the home not as a distant relic but as a site of active co-presence. Projects such as Altair4’s Domus Experience allow visitors to walk through AR reconstructions of Pompeii, using tablets or headsets to visualise restored columns, frescoes, and furniture over ruins. These tools transform a fragmented peristyle into a bustling courtyard, or a bare atrium into a room rich with sound, shade, and symbolic placement. Sensory cues—light slanting through a reconstructed compluvium, imagined footsteps across a virtual mosaic—invite emotional resonance alongside historical awareness.

But embodiment in virtual space carries interpretive stakes. Whose body is imagined moving through these reconstructions? Whose movements are prioritised or constrained by the technology’s design? Early AR platforms often assumed a default, able-bodied user navigating at a fixed height and pace, flattening diverse experiences of mobility, height, and perception. As researchers in inclusive digital heritage point out, sensory access is not neutral. A tactile panel or vibration cue can profoundly affect how blind or neurodivergent users engage with augmented reality in Pompeii, making the domestic site more than just visually immersive—it becomes materially meaningful.

Projects like Invisible Pompeii challenge ableist defaults by offering multiple sensory modes of interaction. By integrating spatial audio, haptic feedback, and customisable pacing, these experiences decentralise sight and foreground alternative forms of knowing. A person listening to layered domestic sounds—water trickling, tools scraping, voices murmuring—may uncover traces of everyday life that visuals alone cannot convey. Here, virtual reality in Pompeii homes becomes a medium not of spectacle, but of sensory justice. It opens up heritage to bodies historically excluded from dominant narratives of access and presence.

Such embodied reconstructions also deepen our understanding of spatial affect. How does it feel to stand in a reconstructed triclinium beneath a painted ceiling? What changes when a user crouches to a child’s height and experiences the frescoes from below? These interactions reveal that ancient spaces were never static—they shifted depending on gesture, posture, and proximity. Through AR, visitors can now rehearse these bodily relations and discover the home as a choreography of movement. In doing so, they move beyond surface appearance into emotional texture.

Yet with this potential comes ethical responsibility. When developers programme virtual touch or motion into a reconstruction, they shape not just experience but memory. The inclusion—or erasure—of certain gestures (kneeling at an altar, lifting a storage jar) reflects assumptions about whose labour, belief, or routine is worth preserving. If 3d reconstruction Pompeii platforms are to honour the domestic sphere, they must attend to these microhistories of embodiment. Even a simple gesture, faithfully rendered, can resist historical flattening.

The Domus AR prototype by CNR-ISPC addresses this by embedding user choice within the experience. Visitors select whose perspective to inhabit—a cook, a child, an enslaved attendant—and the environment shifts accordingly. Thresholds that seemed open may now be closed; spaces once central may recede into the periphery. This multiplicity unsettles the idea of a “typical” Roman home and foregrounds diversity within domestic life. It also reminds users that homes were experienced unevenly, shaped by power as much as architecture.

Crucially, embodied AR interactions can expose the politics of historical absence. Walking through a digitally restored room and suddenly encountering an empty alcove prompts questions: What once stood here, and why was it omitted? This absence is not failure—it is an invitation. Rather than sealing the past into a finished simulation, the best AR reconstructions of Pompeii maintain the room for doubt, revision, and return. They render incompleteness not as lack, but as ethical space.

When bodies re-enter these domestic ruins via augmented means, they do not simply consume a story—they become co-authors of it. They test interpretations, resist simplifications, and reimagine the site in dialogue with their sensorium. This is where exploring Pompeii through augmented reality reaches its full potential: not in perfect replication, but in participatory reanimation. Through situated, inclusive, and critical embodiment, we begin to dwell, not just observe, the lives once lived among these walls.

Sensory Futures: Reimagining Pompeii Through Critical Augmented Reality

To explore Pompeii through augmented reality is to enter a double vision—where tactile absence meets visual invention. These reconstructions hover between presence and projection, offering digital touchstones for a past that remains materially fractured. Yet within their pixelated walls lies an ethical imperative: to engage not just with spectacle, but with the layered politics of what—and who—is being represented. Augmented reality in Pompeii must therefore do more than dazzle; it must ask whom these ruins belong to, and how we might honour that claim through inclusive design.

When we walk through a virtual reality in Pompeii’s home, we encounter not only simulated rooms but inherited interpretive frameworks. Each rendered doorway, each re-coloured wall, reinscribes choices about gender, labour, class, and visibility. If these models are to serve as tools of education and empathy, they must foreground uncertainty as much as clarity. Projects that integrate user-controlled annotations, provenance flags, and multisensory accessibility options move us closer to that goal. They allow users to question as they explore—to not just see, but think through the reconstruction.

Crucially, these technologies open up possibilities for 3d reconstruction of Pompeii, efforts to centre non-dominant narratives. By incorporating findings from household archaeology, gender studies, and disability-inclusive design, developers can shift the lens from elite spectacle to everyday life. A narrow corridor might be framed not as merely functional, but as a site of routine, negotiation, or marginality. A reconstructed kitchen can evoke the rhythms of preparation and survival, rather than remain an inert backdrop to elite dining. In these shifts, the domestic emerges not as a passive setting, but as a charged arena of historical possibility.

The challenge lies in resisting the false authority of seamless simulation. Hyper-real visuals may impress, but they can also obscure the speculative scaffolding behind each decision. Ethical reconstructions should make room for doubt—for ghosted alternatives, contested readings, and fragmentary returns. In doing so, augmented reality in Pompeii can become a space for encounter rather than erasure, where absence is not patched over, but honoured as part of the historical record.

Pompeii’s homes were never just ruins—they were once lived, felt, and fiercely negotiated spaces. As we reimagine them through digital means, we are not merely rebuilding what was lost; we are choosing how to frame the past for future publics. The best reconstructions don’t just fill in the gaps—they teach us to read the gaps differently. And in that reading, in that careful calibration of sense and silence, the past becomes newly legible—not as monument, but as dialogue.