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 heritage artifacts for historians and scientists. Moreover, virtual presentations (combined with new forms of presentation technologies, such as hybrid exhibitions) can be used as a means to increase attractiveness and public engagement.

[1] Join the open mailing list!

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

We held workshop at Web3D 2015 launching the Cultural and Natural Heritage Working Group. Also we were at SIGGRAPH 2015 with a BOF and booth information on the effort!

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)