VEX-CMS: a easy tool for creating 3D virtual exhibitions

[ahpook]

[EDIT: demo available for download at http://hcilab.uniud.it/vex/]

Hi all,

in the past year the Human-Computer Interaction Lab of the University of Udine, Italy,
has developed a visual editor (and a viewer) for virtual exhibitions, called VEX-CMS, based on Ogre.
The editor allows a curator with minimal technical knowledge to assemble a virtual exhibition (e.g. of artworks),
and design tours for virtual visitors.



The design of tours is made easier by a software module we developed that is able to automatically
position a virtual camera based on a list of requests about objects to be seen and related features such
as size, angles, framing, occlusions (see examples in the video below, which
illustrates the functioning of VEX-CMS).



If you're interested, you can download a demo the software at http://hcilab.uniud.it/vex/
and read about VEX-CMS in the following paper:

Chittaro L., Ieronutti L., Ranon R. VEX-CMS: A tool to design virtual exhibitions and walkthroughs that integrates automatic camera control capabilities, Proceedings of SG 2010: 10th international symposium on Smart Graphics, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6133, Springer Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, June 2010, pp. 103-114.

HCI-Lab, University of Udine

[sinbad]

Very nice! Lots of attention to detail and user-friendly behaviour here and I can see this being very useful to many.

[vitefalcon]

That's an awesome work done!
I once tried to do that same thing but it was by editing Second Life client to make it 'haptic' and let users roam around in a German Museum. But, by the looks of it, this is far better and fun to use than that

[ahpook]

Thanks for the nice words! I forgot also to thank the Ogre community for the engine and all the support
we got from this forum.

Also, to implement VEX-CMS we have developed a "framework" (as many others have done, probably) that comprizes Ogre, wxWidgets, Bullet,
awesomium, ogremax/ofusion loaders, and some generally useful code (camera control, path planning, ...). If there is people interested
we are willing to opensource it.

[ahpook]

Thanks for the nice words! I forgot also to thank the Ogre community for the engine and all the support
we got from this forum.

Also, to implement VEX-CMS we have developed a "framework" (as many others have done, probably) that comprizes Ogre, wxWidgets, Bullet,
awesomium, ogremax/ofusion loaders, and some generally useful code (camera control, path planning, ...). If there is people interested
we are willing to opensource it.

[ahpook]

Hi,

just to announce that we have released a working demo of VEX, which you can download at http://hcilab.uniud.it/vex/.

If you are giving it a try, let us know what you think!

HCI Lab

[DavlexDesign]

Very nice indeed, would be nice for virtual malls and things like that, Open sourcing this thing would be very desirable (once you are ready), would be interesting to see how you put your framework together. I'm working on something myself, and plan to release it later, when I have it friendly enough to be useful too, as I don't have an editor for my thing yet, it's all still pretty experimental.

Alex

[rogma]

Very nice work. Congratulations.