Authoring of 3D Based Multimedia Applications for the World Wide Web

Dedicated animation description and 3D languages for the WWW such as VRML as well as freely available tools bring 3D graphics as part of multimedia increasingly in the scope of everyday use. However, there are still questions how to perform easy authoring 3D based multimedia applications and where there are real applications apart from advertising and entertainment. As a real application hypermedia based information systems and their use in WWW based catalogues are described. Moreover, a set of authoring tools that support the interactive specification of hypermedia structures and connections between 3D models and different types of media are presented.