3D-powerpoint: towards a design tool for digital exhibitions of cultural artifacts

We describe first steps towards a suite of tools for CH professionals to set up and run digital exhibitions of cultural 3D artifacts in museums. Both the authoring and the presentation views shall finally be as easy to use as, e.g., Microsoft Powerpoint. But instead of separated slides our tool uses pre-defined 3D scenes, called 'layouts', containing geometric objects acting as placeholders, called 'drop targets'. They can be replaced quite easily, in a drag-and-drop fashion, by digitized 3D models, and also by text and images, to customize and adapt a digital exhibition to the style of the real museum. Furthermore, the tool set contains easy-to-use tools for the rapid 3D modeling of simple geometry and for the alignment of given models to a common coordinate system.

The technical innovation is that the tool set is not a monolithic application. Instead it is completely based on scripted designs, using the OpenSG scene graph engine and the GML scripting language. This makes it extremely flexible: Anybody capable of drag-and-drop can design 3D exhibitions. Anybody capable of GML scripting can create new designs. And finally, we claim that the presentation setup of our designs is 'grandparent-compliant', meaning that it permits to the public audience the detailed inspection of beautiful cultural 3D objects without getting lost or feeling uncomfortable.