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International audience; The VENUS project aims at providing scientific methodologies and technological tools for the virtual exploration of deep underwater archaeology sites. Underwater archaeological sites, for example shipwrecks, offer extraordinary opportunities for archaeologists due to factors such as darkness, low temperatures and a low oxygen rate which are favourable to preservation. On the other hand, these sites cannot be experienced first hand and today are continuously jeopardised by activities such as deep trawling that destroy their surface layer. The VENUS project will improve the accessibility of underwater sites by generating thorough and exhaustive 3D records for virtual exploration. The project team plans to survey shipwrecks at various depths and to explore advanced methods andtechniques of data acquisition through autonomous or remotely operated unmanned vehicles with innovative sonar and photogrammetry equipment. Research will also cover aspects such as data processing and storage, plotting of archaeological artefacts and information system management. This work will result in a series of best practices and procedures for collecting and storing data. Further, VENUS will develop virtual reality and augmented reality tools for the visualisation of and immersive interaction with a digital model of an underwater site. The model will be made accessible online, both as an example of digital preservation and for demonstrating new facilities of exploration in a safe, cost-effective and pedagogical environment. The virtual underwater site will provide archaeologists with an improved insight into the data and the general public with simulated dives to the site. The VENUS consortium, composed of eleven partners, is pooling expertise in various disciplines: archaeology and underwater exploration, marine robotics and instrumentation, knowledge representation and photogrammetry, virtual reality and digital data preservation.

International audience This article describes on-going developments of the VENUS European Project (Virtual ExploratioN of Underwater Sites, http://www.venus-project.eu) over its first two years of activity. The VENUS project is a collaborative venture which aims to bring together archaeological and scientific methodologies with technological tools for virtual exploration of deep underwater archaeological sites. The breadth of results produced by the project mean that we can only give an overview of the key project elements here. The techniques developed through the work of the project are firmly rooted in the requirements of the archaeologists involved. The on-going dialogue between these archaeological requirements and the technological solutions developed in response to them forms the core of the project. In this article we will describe the evolution of both the archaeological methodologies and the technical solutions that were developed in response to them during the first two sea missions of the project ? the first to Pianosa Island, Italy in October 2006 and the second to Sesimbra, Portugal in October 2007. Realising the integration of the acoustic data stream with the optical data acquisition has formed a major component of the first two years of the project. Acoustic sensors track the position of unmanned underwater vehicles, like ROVs and AUVs, while they collect images during a site's survey. The fusion of acoustic and navigation data provides the seed for the photogrammetric process, recording cameras' position and orientation in real time within the EXIF metadata of the images. In response to archaeological requirements the presentation of the data takes three distinct forms. The first being a traditional two-dimensional representation, conforming to the illustrative norms of archaeological cartography, providing a rich interface to the extensive underlying archaeological datasets. The second presentation is a three-dimensional visualization of the site. By using an augmented reality system we are able to present these complex datasets for archaeologists to investigate in both accepted, traditional, two-dimensional forms but also making use of innovative, three-dimensional interfaces providing new insights on archaeological data. In order to represent the archaeological information, we consider a knowledge base consisting of application ontology and observations. We constructed application ontology for underwater archaeological knowledge. Throughout the course of data acquisition, processing and delivery the project has addressed the need for long-term preservation and access to the dataset. By identifying specific digital preservation requirements of the project the aim is to produce guidelines for the archiving of material derived from future investigations. The project will conclude with a final field mission near Marseille, France, utilising all the techniques developed to undertake a fully automated diver-less survey of a deep-water wreck site. This culmination of the project will realise the desire to provide archaeological and public interaction of an underwater site that is out of the physical reach of the common diver.