X3D Heritage

The Cultural and Natural Heritage Working Group is developing an open interoperable standard for the Archival and Retrieval of cultural heritage and natural objects based on input from a wide variety of imaging modalities.

Millions of cultural heritage artifacts populate our museums and about 90% still await discovery in museum archives. In addition there are millions of natural objects such as insects, hidden in museum drawers. 3D Digital models can provide arbitrary availability and concurrent access to digital alternates of cultural heritage artifacts for art historians and scientist. Moreover Virtual presentation (combined with new forms of presentation technologies, such as hybrid exhibitions) can be used as a means to increase attractiveness.

Goals

   Define Web3D Consortium strategic goals for open standards for Archival and Retrieval of cultural and natural heritage objects 
   Discuss  data size, work flows, scanning, processing tools, publications and best practices 
   Characterize Cultural Heritage requirements and activities by museums, anthroplogy and government agencies

Events

There will be a workshop at Web3D 2015 http://web3d2015.web3d.org/workshops.html about Cultural and Natural Heritage. Go to the link to get all the information about submittion a workshop proposal. Working Group Resources

   Web3D Consortium Home Page examples (in X3DOM): Museums & Artifacts, Buildings / Structures
   CSIRO's insect collection (video, paper, examples)
   Smithsonian 3D models processed by Virginia Tech & Fraunhofer IGD to X3DOM compressed geometry
   Fraunhofer IGD's CultLab object acquisition system
   Geometry processing tool Meshlab (EU, open source)
   Web3D 2015 Workshop (linked at bottom of page)  - slides & videos
   SIGGRAPH 2014 BOF sig14heritage slides
   Digital Heritage 2013 slides (X3DOM)