“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 themselves 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 technology to the graphical user interfaces the designing phase of an exhibition is efficiently simplified, especially for non-technical users. Furthermore, multi-touch technology offers a novel way of collaborative work to be integrated into a decision making process. A flexible export system allows to store created exhibitions in various formats to display them on websites, mobile devices or custom viewers. For example, the widespread 3D scene standard Extensible 3D X3D is one of the export formats and we use it to directly incorporate a realtime preview of the exhibition in the authoring process. The combination of the tangible user interfaces with the realtime preview gives curators and exhibition planers a capable tool for efficiently presenting cultural heritage in electronic media.