Dynamic generation of educational virtual exhibitions

The virtual reality is an effective way to convey educational contents, especially in the cultural heritage field. Nevertheless, its diffusion in e-learning is not as common as one would expect. The main reasons can be found in the complexity for the development of virtual environments and in the users´ difficulties for a comfortable navigation of the scenes. To overcome these problems, we propose a Web-based authoring system that enables people without skills on 3D technologies, to define and generate their customized virtual exhibitions. Moreover, in the generated environments a specific navigational paradigm is adopted: it is conceived as a multimodal enhancement of guided tours, allowing us to improve the navigation of the scenes. The system can be profitably used as an LCMS by teachers, as well as a customized virtual exhibitions generator by visitors of cultural institutions.