Easy Access to Huge 3D Models of Works of Art

Automatic shape acquisition technologies evolved rapidly in recent years, and huge mass of 3D data can be easily produced. The high accuracy of range scanning technology makes the Cultural Heritage domain one of the ideal fields of use of these devices. Given this particular application domain, two issues arise: how to visualize at interactive rates these complex data on commodity computers (both locally and on web), and how to improve the ease of use of the visualization tools (as potential users are often not expert with interactive graphics). We present a new visualization system designed to support easy implementation of multimedia kiosk for museums or expositions, which has also been extended to web-based usage. The system allows naive users to inspect a large complex 3D model at interactive frame rates on off-the-shelf PC’s, presenting the 3D model and all the multimedia data that has been linked to selected points of its surface. A main goal in the design of the system was to provide the user with a very easy and natural interaction approach, based on a straightforward “point and click” metaphor. Visualization efficiency is obtained by adopting a continuous level-of-detail (LOD) representation, where on-line automatic selection of the best-fit level of detail (according to the current view frustum) is coupled with visibility culling and ready-to-render representation of the geometry.