VirMuF: The Virtual Museum Framework

Abstract

With the immergence of 3D object digitization technologies, many museums are digitizing their collections using 3D scanning, photogrammetry and other techniques. These large 3D collections are not only great for documentation and preservation, but they are also a great means for introducing these collections to a wider audience worldwide through virtual museums. However, developing Virtual Museums can be a costly process considering that it needs a team of talented software developers, 3D designers and other software/hardware tools. In this paper we present VirMuF (Virtual Museum Framework), which is a set of tools that can be used by non-developers to easily create and publish 3D virtual museums in a very short time. This way, Museum staff doing collection digitization can also publish 3D virtual museums to exhibit these collections. VirMuF is open-source; hence, teams including software developers can further extend VirMuF to fit their needs.