Virtual heritage to go

In this paper we show our conceptual approach of how easy it can be to develop web apps that provide real-time 3D support, behave like native apps and run platform independently on smartphones, tablets (e.g., iPad), and on desktop computers. This reduces development efforts while moving to a distributed application model. The concept is completely based on standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, DOM scripting, and Ajax. 3D rendering happens entirely on the client-side by utilizing X3DOM and WebGL respectively. In the context of virtual museums web apps can be used to give visitors and also experts such as curators the possibility to examine virtual heritage objects. By interacting with the 3D model more details can be explored, additional information in form of metadata and annotations can be obtained and also created, and finally the navigation to external resources is supported, too. It is also possible to inspect related objects of similar type, even if they are situated in locations that are far away.