An Interactive Visualisation Interface for Virtual Museums

Cultural institutions, such as museums are particularly interested in making their collections accessible to people with physical disabilities. New technologies, such as Web3D and augmented reality (AR) can aid museums to respond to this challenge by building virtual museums accessible over the Internet or through kiosks located in accessible places within the museum. In this paper, we propose a prototype user-friendly visualisation interface that uses Web3D and AR techniques to visualise cultural heritage artefacts for virtual museum exhibitions. User interactions within the virtual museum are performed in an effective way with the help of assistive technology, so that users can feel completely related with the virtual museum artefacts and so benefit in terms of education and entertainment.

[1]  R. Kadobayashi,et al.  VSMM’96 in Gifu Meta-Museum: A Supportive Augmented-Reality Environment for Knowledge Sharing , 1996 .

[2]  Emmanuel Dubois,et al.  Notational Support for the Design of Augmented Reality Systems , 2002, DSV-IS.

[3]  John R. Wilson,et al.  Structured Evaluation of Virtual Environments for Special-Needs Education , 1999, Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments.

[4]  Gianluca Castelnuovo,et al.  Virtual Reality based tools for the rehabilitation of cognitive and executive functions: the V-STORE , 2003, PsychNology J..

[5]  Katashi Nagao,et al.  The world through the computer: computer augmented interaction with real world environments , 1995, UIST '95.

[6]  Clark Germann,et al.  Using Computer-Based Virtual Tours to Assist Persons With Disabilities , 2003, J. Educ. Technol. Soc..

[7]  P N Wilson,et al.  Virtual reality, disability and rehabilitation. , 1997, Disability and rehabilitation.

[8]  Marek Hatala,et al.  Ontology and rule based retrieval of sound objects in augmented audio reality system for museum visitors , 2004, SAC '04.

[9]  Ivan Poupyrev,et al.  The MagicBook: a transitional AR interface , 2001, Comput. Graph..

[10]  Edwin D. Reilly,et al.  Interactive system , 2003 .

[11]  G.C. Burdea,et al.  Virtual reality-enhanced stroke rehabilitation , 2001, IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

[12]  Ivan Poupyrev,et al.  Virtual object manipulation on a table-top AR environment , 2000, Proceedings IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Augmented Reality (ISAR 2000).

[13]  Ronald Azuma,et al.  Recent Advances in Augmented Reality , 2001, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[14]  H. Ring Is neurological rehabilitation ready for 'immersion' in the world of virtual reality? , 1998, Disability and rehabilitation.

[15]  Holger Regenbrecht,et al.  Interaction in a collaborative augmented reality environment , 2002, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[16]  H Poizner,et al.  Virtual reality-based post-stroke hand rehabilitation. , 2002, Studies in health technology and informatics.

[17]  Martin White,et al.  Augmented reality interface toolkit , 2004, Proceedings. Eighth International Conference on Information Visualisation, 2004. IV 2004..

[18]  Oliver Bimber,et al.  The virtual showcase as a new platform for augmented reality digital storytelling , 2003, IPT/EGVE.

[19]  Martin White,et al.  ARCOLite-an XML based system for building and presenting virtual museum exhibitions using Web3D and augmented reality , 2004, Proceedings Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics, 2004..

[20]  Daniel Pletinckx,et al.  Virtual-Reality Heritage Presentation at Ename , 2000, IEEE Multim..

[21]  Erik Champion,et al.  Cultural Engagement in Virtual Heritage Environments with Inbuilt Interactive Evaluation Mechanisms , 2002 .

[22]  W. Buxton Human-Computer Interaction , 1988, Springer Berlin Heidelberg.