“Tangible Culture” – Designing virtual exhibitions on multi-touch devices¹

Issue title: 16th International Conference on Electronic Publishing – ELPUB 2012 – Social Shaping of Digital Publishing: Exploring the Interplay between Culture and Technology

Guest editors: Ana BaptistaGuest Editor, Peter LindeGuest Editor, Niklas LavessonGuest Editor and Miguel A. BritoGuest Editor

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Hecher, M.^{a; *} | Möstl, R.^b | Eggeling, E.^a | Derler, C.^b | Fellner, D.W.^a

Affiliations: [a] Fraunhofer Austria Research GmbH, Graz, Austria | [b] Joanneum Research GmbH, Graz, Austria

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Martin Hecher, Fraunhofer Austria Research GmbH, Inffeldgasse 16c, 8010 Graz, Austria; E-mail: martin.hecher@vc.fraunhofer.at.

Note: [1] Paper also published in the Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, ISBN 978-1-61499-064-2.

Abstract: Cultural heritage institutions such as galleries, museums and libraries increasingly use digital media to present artifacts to their audience and enable them to immerse themselves in a cultural virtual world. With the application eXhibition:editor3D museum curators and editors have a software tool at hand to interactively plan and visualize exhibitions. In this paper we present an extension to the application that enhances the workflow when designing exhibitions. By introducing multi-touch technology to the graphical user interfaces the designing phase of an exhibition is efficiently simplified, especially for non-technical users. Furthermore, multi-touch technology offers a novel way of collaborative work to be integrated into a decision making process. A flexible export system allows to store created exhibitions in various formats to display them on websites, mobile devices or custom viewers. For example, the widespread 3D scene standard Extensible 3D (X3D) is one of the export formats and we use it to directly incorporate a realtime preview of the exhibition in the authoring process. The combination of the tangible user interfaces with the realtime preview gives curators and exhibition planers a capable tool for efficiently presenting cultural heritage in electronic media.

Keywords: Multi touch, virtual exhibitions, interactive design, digital preservation, X3D

DOI: 10.3233/ISU-2012-0649

Journal: Information Services & Use, vol. 31, no. 3-4, pp. 199-208, 2011