An Authoring System for the Automatic Generation of Virtual Exhibitions

The use of virtual reality on the Web offers exciting opportunities in several application fields (e.g. cultural heritage, elearning, e-commerce). Nevertheless, the adoption of such technology is not as widespread as one would expect. The main reasons can be found both in the difficulties for the development of virtual environments, which requires a collection of advanced skills and a variety of tasks, and in the limitations of current desktop virtual reality technologies which do not allow users for a comfortable navigation of the scenes. To overcome these problems, we propose an authoring system which enables authors without skills on 3D technologies to automatically generate their own virtual exhibitions. Moreover, to simplify the navigation within the scenes, a specific paradigm based on the concept of guided tour has been adopted in the generated exhibitions.