Low-cost VRML Based Architecture for Adaptive and User Customized VirtualVisits to Art Galleries

摘要

This paper presents an innovative procedure,capable to automatically generate virtual environments whichare applicable to art galleries, museums or similar facilities,and suitable for web-based promotions of artists and theirworks. The presented system is part of the outcome of aninterdisciplinary research for low-cost and platformindependent solutions to combine art with virtual reality withthe aim to promote artist works through new interactionmetaphors which include dynamic 3D visualization of works ofart with associated structured multimedia information.In detail, we present the resulting low-cost and platform-independent VRML-based architecture for the automaticgeneration of user-customized virtual visits in 3D of artgalleries based on XML descriptions.As the VRML standard presents a lack of flexibility whencustomizing the scenarios according to special user interests,which could be different in every session, we propose a newstrategy consisting in decoupling the associated multimediainformation from the geometrical description of the presentedartworks. This approach provides an external management ofthose contents, hence overcoming the identified limitation,while additionally increasing design efficiency and contentadaptability.Artworks, art galleries, adaptive virtual scenes, web technology,user customized virtual environment, low-cost, platformindependent, VRML, XML, metaphors.