Technical Section3DHOP: 3D Heritage Online Presenter
Graphical abstract
Introduction
It is becoming much easier to deal with 3D content on the web. Due to recent hardware and software advancements, the 3D web is moving away from the “swamp” of proprietary, heavyweight plugins. Nevertheless, specific niches in the world of potential users of the 3D web media, which are somehow far from the mainstream use of 3D data, are still uncovered. One of these peculiar user groups is the one focusing on Cultural Heritage (CH) and using high resolution 3D models of real-world artifacts. Digital 3D models of CH artifacts are nowadays widespread and, beside their more “technical” uses (documentation, restoration support, study and measurement) they are becoming very valuable in dissemination, teaching and presentation to the public. Even if there are applications where lower-resolution hand-modeled 3D models may suffice, in many other cases high-resolution digitized geometries are essential to convey correct information.
This paper presents a software framework, 3DHOP (3D Heritage Online Presenter), designed to cope with the needs of this specific user group. The use of 3DHOP simplifies the creation of interactive visualization webpages, able to display high-resolution 3D models, with intuitive user interaction/manipulation; moreover, these resources can be deeply connected with the rest of the webpage elements (Fig. 1).
Note that CH is not the only application domain dealing with very high-resolution models and requiring a dense interconnection between those models and other data or media. In this sense, CH is a major domain of inspiration and assessment for our activity, but not the only application context for 3DHOP technology.
The most interesting characteristics of the 3DHOP framework are:
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The ability to work with extremely complex 3D meshes or point clouds (tens of million triangles/vertices), using a streaming-friendly multiresolution scheme.
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The ease of use for developers, especially those with background in web programming, thanks to the use of declarative-style scene creation and exposed JavaScript functions used to control the interaction.
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The availability of a number of basic building blocks for creating interactive visualizations, each one configurable, but at the same time providing sensible defaults and comprehensive documentation.
3DHOP is based on the WebGL subset of HTML5, and on SpiderGL [1], a JavaScript support library oriented to advanced Computer Graphics (CG) programming. Thanks to this, 3DHOP works without the need of plugins on most modern browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera) on all platforms. On mobile devices the support is still ongoing in some cases, but this situation will improve in the near future. 3DHOP has been released as open source (GPL licence) in April 2014, and it is available to be tested and used. The downloadable package, with documentation, a series of tutorials (How-Tos) and a Gallery of examples is available at the website http://www.3dhop.net.
Section snippets
Related work
Here, we focus on three main aspects of the 3DHOP framework. First, we review the technologies to handle the 3D content on the web, than we present some solutions about how to transmit the 3D content efficiently. For completeness we report also some works related to the offline visualization of huge models, by focusing mainly on papers related to our framework.
Design choices of the 3DHOP framework
3DHOP has been designed with the aim of being easy to use, especially for people having a background in web development, thus without requiring solid knowledge in CG programming.
Our core idea was to mimic the philosophy of those pre-made html/javascript components available online, for example, for image slideshow, date or color picker, charts and graphs. These components can be simply plugged inside a webpage including some scripts and adding few lines of HTML, and used by just changing some
Inside the 3DHOP framework
3DHOP is based on the WebGL component of HTML5, and on the SpiderGL [1] library. This makes the framework extremely lightweight in terms of dependencies, and able to run on most modern browsers and platforms. 3DHOP does not need plugins or additional components installed in the client, nor specialized servers. The tool works on all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera on Windows, MacOS and Linux. Mobile support is still not complete, mainly due to the mobile
Using 3DHOP
The tradeoff between ease of use and flexibility is a major issue when creating a tool for non-expert developers. If the features are too simple or restricted, users with particular needs may not find proper support; on the other hand, an increase in flexibility could reduce simplicity of use. For this reason, the 3DHOP tool has been designed with different levels of entry, to be as straightforward as possible for the more simple cases but, at the same time, able to provide enough configurable
Ongoing work, perspectives and conclusions
3DHOP is an ongoing effort, which already reached a level of consolidation that allowed us to disclose it and share with the community. We are regularly releasing new versions of the tool; one major update was made on October 2014, and the next one is scheduled for June 2015, as there are several features and extensions already on our roadmap. Since we conceive 3DHOP as a framework, there are many new components (or variations of the existing ones) that can be added to support the creation of
Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 313193 (EC INFRA “ARIADNE” project) and EC ERIC “DARIAH” project.
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