State-of-the-art web technologies for progressive presentation of synthetic cultural heritage scenes

With the advancement of both 3D scanning technologies and Web3D, it is now feasible to convert Cultural Heritage objects and locations of interest into synthetic 3D scenes, and directly embed them in HTML pages so that users can visit them remotely, from practically any Web-enabled device. However, since such scanned scenes tend to be extremely detailed and consist of large volumes of data, browsing them can become a long, burdensome experience. While a number of progressive streaming approaches for 3D graphics have been proposed in the past, such methods tend to require a radical restructuring of the original data in order to be streamed to a web client. We implement a platform for 3D scenes that can stream any model encoded in declarative X3DOM format without further pre-processing. We explore a number of state-of-the-art web technologies for model transmission, and compare them to the typical methods used until now. We present the advantages of each, and lay the groundwork for further extensions to our approach, towards a large-scale platform for the smooth streaming distribution of detailed 3D scenes to a large number of clients, without needing to destroy the original model Web3D format.