Preserving heritage through spatial computing: Inside Adalberto Lonardi's Foshan Tales
The traditional event and gallery model is fundamentally broken. Passive viewing leads to dead dwell time, low engagement, and zero first-party data capture for organizers. To truly capture an audience's attention, you cannot just show them history; you must immerse them in it.
In his installation, Foshan Tales, Italian artist and designer Adalberto Lonardi bridges the gap between ancient cultural heritage and modern spatial computing. Partnering with Augmento, Lonardi transforms a large-scale physical glass and steel installation into an interactive digital gateway.
Adalberto Lonardi, whose practice centres on cross-cultural collaboration and heritage, detailing the vision behind Foshan Tales.
The concept: A cathedral of Chinese heritage
Foshan Tales was conceived as a cultural dialogue between Italian architectural expression and Chinese heritage. Drawing on the cathedral-like language of stained glass, the work elevates everyday rituals into a contemporary visual narrative.
The physical structure interacts dynamically with its environment. By day, coloured shadows spill onto visitors, symbolically inviting them into the continuum of cultural practice. By night, the structure transforms into a glowing lantern, a potent symbol in Chinese culture of guidance, reunion, and hope.
The installation features four coloured glass mosaics that explore enduring values embedded in traditional Chinese culture:
Chinese Tea Ceremony: Representing the tea house family gathering, this scene anchors the work in everyday intimacy and reflects the Confucian ideal of jia (家), where the family unit forms the foundation of social order.
Cantonese Opera: Rendered through light and colour, this scene acts as both spectacle and archive, reflecting cultural memory, moral storytelling, and aesthetic refinement.
Dragon Boat Race: Embodying Confucian ideals of unity, discipline, and communal cooperation, this ritual reflects a worldview where collective action safeguards social harmony and wellbeing.
Lion Dance: Historically performed to ward off misfortune, this dynamic form translated into luminous glass suggests the transmission of auspicious energy and vitality across time.
The dragon boat race mosaic, embodying ideals of unity and communal cooperation.
The engine: High-fidelity spatial computing
Executing a vision of this magnitude requires flawless infrastructure. To deliver the highest fidelity interactive experience possible, Foshan Tales was deployed through a dedicated Augmento iPad application.
By utilizing a custom iPad app, the platform's advanced spatial tracking maps the exact dimensions of the real-world glass and steel structures. This ensures that digital assets lock seamlessly onto the physical environment, affirming the Chinese philosophical belief that the past and present coexist.
The surface: Transforming passive viewers into active explorers
Through a dedicated user interface, the artwork becomes a storytelling device. The dynamic environment includes:
A bilingual toggle allowing users to experience the narrative in English (EN) or Chinese (中文).
Expandable informational modules that dive deep into the history of each cultural practice.
A frictionless "START AR EXPERIENCE" trigger that launches the spatial immersion directly over the physical art.
The result? Total immersion.
Stop renting your audience, start owning them
Whether you are an event director trying to eliminate dead dwell time, a real estate developer selling off-plan to international buyers, or an artist breaking the physical limits of a gallery, spatial computing is the answer.
Ready to see what Augmento's spatial computing engine can do for your brand?
Reach out to us today and let's build your immersive world.
