Digital Heritage Collections and Museums: 3D Interaction and Visualization Techniques

This article presents a platform that implements interaction and graphic visualization techniques that are specially tailored for editing and visualizing 3D Digital Museums. Building and managing online virtual exhibitions of Cultural Heritage sites can be a cumbersome and difficult task. Traditional 3D editing software can be used to create such feats, but are difficult to use and do not offer other interactive actions outside of the simple world building and creation of animations. In this paper, a solution is proposed for the aforementioned topic. We propose a set of interaction techniques that are supported by a 3D Media Catalog, which allows the users to enrich the museum with their own items in the form of 3D objects, images, videos, audio and text. The presented prototype enables users to create and share such environments. It allows for the usage of 3D building scans as basis to create engaging experiences and virtual exhibitions using several features such as building slicing, colliders, placement of media objects, creation of guided tours, and navigation portals. To evaluate the proposed features, a usability test was performed and the results show that the platform is feasible and can be used to successfully create a 3D exhibition in as little as 10 minutes.