• 3d graphics
• 3DHOP
• web viewer
• web3d
• webgl

Web3D is most certainly an intriguing world.
Its story has changed suddenly with the advent of WebGL, evolving from a slow and stagnant past to a dynamic and rapidly-evolving present. 3D data is becoming one of the key digital media on the Web, with a wide number of solutions specifically designed for publishing and consuming three-dimensional content online.
Unfortunately, this field experimented a quick and often chaotic growth, presenting nowadays a dichotomy between pure research-oriented and market-oriented approaches. This has somehow shaped the directions of Web3D development, creating de-facto standards and solutions tailored to specific fields, or only focused towards mainstream publishing actions and thus unable to cope with the needs of more specialized and technical 3D users.

Under these premises, the aim of the thesis has been to investigate the shortcomings and missing features of Web3D technology, as well as to propose a solution aimed at filling these empty spots.

We start by presenting an analysis of the state of the art of 3D Web publishing, surveying the features provided by the major current approaches, useful to categorize the existing solutions and to cross-map them with the requirements of the different application domains.
Then, in what is the main contribution of the thesis, we exploit the result of our analysis of the Web3D and discuss the design and implementation of a flexible platform, aimed at providing an effective framework for the Web presentation of specialized 3D content.
Our solution is tailored to cope with the needs of a challenging application context, Cultural Heritage. Therefore it exploits highly-efficient solutions for data transfer and rendering, intuitive interaction/manipulation paradigms, and features enabling trans-media elements connections.

To validate the proposed framework, the thesis presents the results of two specific interactive visualization applications, addressing different Web3D presentation needs: a first one aimed at a museum dissemination initiative, and a second one developed to support scientific analysis.

Finally, we also tested the capabilities of our platform for the implementation of service-oriented applications: a project aimed at providing a service for the easy publication of complex, technical media types; and a more structured scenario of multimedia Digital Libraries, proposing a pipeline useful to rationalize and speed-up the publication of heterogeneous 3D dataset on a multimedia repository.