Digitisation to Presentation - Building Virtual Museum Exhibitions

Abstract

We describe an innovative system designed for museums to create, manage and present multimedia based representations of museum artefacts in virtual exhibitions both inside and outside museums. Our system creates digital surrogates through a novel stereo photogrammetry system with little user interaction. The resulting 3D objects are refined using state-of-the-art 3D modelling software configured for ease of use by museum staff. A repository of such digital surrogates is managed in an XML enabled relational database and provides the basis for the creation and presentation of virtual museum exhibitions, allowing current museum websites to evolve from a 2D to a 3D multimedia-rich domain. In this paper, we discuss the modelling and refinement processes which are based on stereo photogrammetry and the creation and visualisation of virtual museum exhibitions using virtual and augmented reality techniques.