ARCO System

ARCO System is an integrated software suite enabling museums and other cultural heritage institutions to create, manage and display virtual exhibitions of cultural artifacts. The exhibitions may take forms of interactive 3D spaces, augmented reality presentations or rich multimedia web presentations. All exhibitions can be accessed both locally in the museums and remotely on the Internet.

The ARCO System is a result of an international cooperation of scientists and museum staff. It covers the entire chain of preparation and management of virtual museums - starting from digitalization of cultural objects, through their refinement, storage and collection management up to presentation in various interfaces: Web pages, 3D scenes, Virtual Reality environments and Augmented Reality interfaces.

The use of the ARCO system starts when a cultural object is digitalized. Prepared photos, movies, textual descriptions, 3D scans, sounds, etc. are loaded and stored in the ARCO database. Any type of file may be stored in the ARCO database - from text files, through images and movies up to 3D models. The ARCO database is extensible. If a new type of files should be used in the ARCO system (e.g., a 3D animation), the administrator of the system defines such a type using a special tool and the file type becomes accessible. No database structure remodeling is necessary. Every cultural object stored in the database is represented by a set of media objects and associated metadata.

All data in the ARCO database are managed by the use of a user-friendly graphical tool - ACMA application. Using ACMA a user may load and update data, manage users, manage data types and prepare virtual expositions. Because the ACMA application has been constructed in cooperation with museum curatorial staff, all these operations are simple even for a user with only average computer skills. Creation of a virtual exhibition from scratch does not require any programming knowledge.

Cultural objects stored in the database may be modified by attaching and removing describing them media objects. Such modifications may be introduced not only in "original" (acquired) cultural objects, but also in its logical copies (refined objects). Such approach permits approved museum user to describe every object (with the use of media objects, like text, image, 3D model, etc.) according to their discretion.

The process of creating virtual exhibitions is simple. A designer can create a virtual exhibition by forming a hierarchy of presentation spaces (folders) and assigning to these spaces three types of elements:

• cultural objects - being digital representations of museum artifacts,
• presentation templates - describing layout and design of the virtual exhibition, and
• search rules - enabling dynamic assignment of objects to spaces

Due to template parameterization, different visualizations can be achieved by the creation of template instances derived from the same template but supplied with different sets of parameter values. For example, a difference between two instances of the same template used in two spaces may be the value of a parameter defining the wall or the floor texture, the method of presenting objects or the arrangement of objects.

In the ARCO system, the concept of presentation domains is used to enable differentiation of the content presentation in different environments, on different platforms or for different groups of users. Multiple instances of presentation templates can be assigned to presentation spaces.