Semantics-Supported Collaborative Creation of Interactive 3D Content

Interactive 3D techniques offer a new quality in the design of user interfaces of computer applications, in particular when 3D applications are accessible remotely over the internet. A critical element for building practical 3D applications is adequate 3D synthetic content. However, designing high-quality interactive 3D content is a complex and challenging task. This difficulty is one of the major obstacles preventing widespread use of 3D techniques on the web in many promising application domains. In this paper, a new approach to 3D content creation is presented. The approach employs a range of techniques for simplification of the content creation process, but its main novelty lies in the fact that properly structured content can be created by communities of designers, regardless of whether they explicitly collaborate or not. Appropriate organization and consistency of the user-contributed content is enforced by the use of semantic web techniques with external domain ontologies. The presented approach is consistent both with the existing content creation pipelines and business models, aiming at enhancing and not replacing the current practices in digital content creation. A prototype of a tool for 3D content design implemented as an extension to the Unity IDE is also presented.