Tactile prints in colour: Studying the Visual Appearance of 2.5D Prints for Heritage Recreations

Printing applications for heritage recreation are a means to allow audiences to appreciate details and engage with cultural materials through closer interaction. A 2.5D print is a media suitable to incorporate visual and tactile qualities such as colour, low relief, textures and roughness. Designing a colour-accurate tactile print requires, nevertheless, anticipating how specific shapes and meso-geometries will affect the reflective properties of the surface, thus changing its appearance. Hence, this paper contributes to improve the understanding of the interaction between geometry and colour when deploying 2.5D prints so that tactile portable replicas can be easily produced. For this, we have produced a series of 2.5D printed patches with varying meso-textures, based on procedural noise functions, and measured their colour coordinates and glossiness. We aim to find a correlation between colour shift (expressed as lightness, chroma and ?E) and the scale and distribution of surface details.