Daniel Biella

Schema migration into a web-based framework for generating virtual museums and laboratories

This article describes ongoing work and further enhancements of the Replicave2 framework, which supports museum designers creating virtual museum exhibitions by reusing 3D models and dynamically generated content. It focuses primarily on the conversion of the individual software packages included in the toolbox ViMEDEAS (Virtual Museum Exhibition Designer using the Enhanced ARCO Standard) to migrate the new metadata standard ViMCOX (Virtual Museum and Cultural Object Exchange Format). ViMCOX, now available in version 1.1, is used for describing digitized cultural objects and virtual museums based on several international museum standards. Furthermore, application examples and showcases including outdoor exhibition elements are highlighted.

Beyond the ARCO standard

This paper reports on ongoing work concerning an extension of the ARCO (Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects) museum standard. It describes a modern Virtual Museum (VM) with both old and contemporary resources, including interactive exhibition content and room installations, together with its multimedia representations. A new curator software tool, ViMEDEAS, and its application in a real museum are also presented.

Crowdsourcing and Knowledge Co-creation in Virtual Museums

This paper gives an overview on crowdsourcing practices in virtual museums. Engaged nonprofessionals and specialists support curators in creating digital 2D or 3D exhibits, exhibitions and tour planning and enhancement of metadata using the Virtual Museum and Cultural Object Exchange Format (ViMCOX). ViMCOX provides the semantic structure of exhibitions and complete museums and includes new features, such as room and outdoor design, interactions with artwork, path planning and dissemination and presentation of contents. Application examples show the impact of crowdsourcing in the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago de Chile and in the virtual museum depicting the life and work of the Jewish sculptor Leopold Fleischhacker. A further use case is devoted to crowd-based support for restoration of high-quality 3D shapes.

A Parameterizable Framework for Replicated Experiments in Virtual 3D Environments

This paper reports on a parameterizable 3D framework that provides 3D content developers with an initial spatial starting configuration, metaphorical connectors for accessing exhibits or interactive 3D learning objects or experiments, and other optional 3D extensions, such as a multimedia room, a gallery, username identification tools and an avatar selection room. The framework is implemented in X3D and uses a Web-based content management system. It has been successfully used for an interactive virtual museum for key historical experiments and in two additional interactive e-learning implementations: an African arts museum and a virtual science centre. It can be shown that, by reusing the framework, the production costs for the latter two implementations can be significantly reduced and content designers can focus on developing educational content instead of producing cost-intensive out-of-focus 3D objects.

Exploring Collaboration in the Realm of Virtual Museums

Virtual museums have been very popular since the early days of the World Wide Web and many scientific works have been published on this topic. Although the rich variety of possibilities for supporting collaboration among the users of virtual museums, today very few implementations offer support for such kind of activities. This paper aims at settling the value of collaboration in virtual museums by means of depicting and classifying collaborative organization and co-curation activities in establishing, designing, planning, realizing, operating, deploying and visiting a virtual exhibition applying action research. As a use case, we present ongoing work to realize a virtual museum devoted to Armenian cross stones (Khachkars).

Metaphorical Design of Virtual Museums and Laboratories: First Insights

This paper highlights and categorizes the rich metaphorical landscape of the modern virtual museum and laboratory realizations recently applied in various leisure, information, presentation and education contexts. It also presents several technical resolutions, from desktop systems to CAVE installations.

Smart Museums – Exploiting Generative Virtual Museums

This paper describes a metadata-based tour recommendation approach for on-site museum and outdoor visits. Recommendations are calculated utilizing spatial exhibit distribution, museum layout, user and navigation profiles, additional constraints as well as art work descriptors. We propose a service-oriented architecture for generating 3D virtual museums as well as a WebSocket layer to process sensor data during the museum visit.

Towards an Evaluation of a Metadata Standard for Generative Virtual Museums

A methodology for evaluating the ViMCOX metadata format for designing virtual museums is discussed. Two evaluation approaches are presented, addressing (1) design aspects of virtual museums, the completeness of the metadata from the visitor’s point of view as well as measuring the acceptance of virtual museums and (2) a qualitative survey in collaboration with museum experts to identify metadata requirements and feature sets for curator tool implementations.