Adaptive Recommendations for Enhanced Non-linear Exploration of Annotated 3D Objects

We introduce a novel approach for letting casual viewers explore detailed 3D models integrated with structured spatially associated descriptive information organized in a graph. Each node associates a subset of the 3D surface seen from a particular viewpoint to the related descriptive annotation, together with its author-defined importance. Graph edges describe, instead, the strength of the dependency relation between information nodes, allowing content authors to describe the preferred order of presentation of information. At run-time, users navigate inside the 3D scene using a camera controller, while adaptively receiving unobtrusive guidance towards interesting viewpoints and history- and location-dependent suggestions on important information, which is adaptively presented using 2D overlays displayed over the 3D scene. The capabilities of our approach are demonstrated in a real-world cultural heritage application involving the public presentation of sculptural complex on a large projection-based display. A user study has been performed in order to validate our approach.