Tangible culture - designing virtual exhibitions on multi-touch devices

Cultural heritage institutions such as galleries, museums and libraries increasingly use digital media to present artifacts to their audience and enable them to immerse in a cultural virtual world. With the application eXhibition: editor3D museum curators and editors have a software tool at hand to interactively plan and visualize exhibitions. In this paper we present an extension to the application that enhances the workflow when designing exhibitions. By introducing multi-touch technologies to the graphical user interfaces the designing phase of an exhibition is efficiently simplified, especially for nontechnical users. Furthermore, multi-touch technologies offer a novel way of collaborative work to be integrated in a decision making process. The widespread 3D scene standard Extensible 3D (X3D) is used as the export format. In using X3D the resulting exhibitions are highly versatile. We show this versatility in directly using X3D's external authoring interface to integrate a realtime preview of the exhibition in the authoring phase. The combination of the tangible user interfaces with the realtime preview gives curators and editors a capable tool for efficiently presenting cultural heritage to a wide audience.