Resurrect3D: An Open and Customizable Platform for Visualizing and Analyzing Cultural Heritage Artifacts

TL;DR

Resurrect3D is an open, customizable platform that enables both casual users and experts to explore, visualize, and analyze cultural artifacts through interactive tools and extendable programming interfaces.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible visualization platform with tools and APIs for cultural heritage exploration and artifact-specific analysis.

Findings

Provides interactive relighting and material editing tools.

Supports creation and sharing of annotated exploration stories.

Enables development of custom visualization and analysis tools.

Abstract

Art and culture, at their best, lie in the act of discovery and exploration. This paper describes Resurrect3D, an open visualization platform for both casual users and domain experts to explore cultural artifacts. To that end, Resurrect3D takes two steps. First, it provides an interactive cultural heritage toolbox, providing not only commonly used tools in cultural heritage such as relighting and material editing, but also the ability for users to create an interactive "story": a saved session with annotations and visualizations others can later replay. Second, Resurrect3D exposes a set of programming interfaces to extend the toolbox. Domain experts can develop custom tools that perform artifact-specific visualization and analysis.