The cave background in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Virgin of the Rocks, with its rocks, flora and distant landscape, is virtually modelled as an explorable three dimensional augmented reality environment situated behind a cutout of the painting’s foreground figures.

In the installation LvD.VotR.AR viewers can enter this ‘marvelous thing within’ and physically explore the evocative cavern of rocks and plants that Leonardo Da Vinci created in his painting. By means of digital visualisation and optical position tracking technologies, an augmented reality (AR) environment is constructed whereby the visitors, using handheld tablets, can step beyond a cut-out of the foreground figures and then explore a purely virtual space wherein that cavern is presented life size and in three dimensions. The finely detailed virtual 3D rendering of Leonardo’s rocky floral cavern occupies an approx. seventy square meters empty floor area, with a drawing on the ground that shows a polygonal contour map of the virtual cave that one is wandering about in. This artwork does not propose to be a literal reconstruction of Leonardo’s painting, but rather as a narrative re-visioning whose AR technologies enable an aesthetics of immersive engagement and embodied experience that in many ways is synchronous with the perspectival discoveries made during the Renaissance.