Publishing cultural heritage as 3D models with embedded annotations and additional information on the web is still a major challenge. This includes the acquisition of the digital 3D model, the authoring and editing of the additional information to be attached to the digital model as well as publishing it in a suitable format. These steps usually require very expensive hardware and software tools. Especially small museums cannot afford an expensive scanning campaign in order to generate the 3D models from the real artifacts. In this paper we propose an affordable publishing workflow from acquisition of the data to authoring and enriching it with the related metadata and information to finally publish it in a way suitable for access by means of a web browser over the internet. All parts of the workflow are based on open source solutions and free services.

ABSTRACT3D is useful in many real-world applications beyond computer games. The efficiency of communication is greatly enhanced by combining interlinked verbal descriptions with 3D content. However, there is a wide gap between the great demand for 3D content and the inconvenience and cost of delivering it. We propose using PDF, which is extremely well supported by standard content production workflows. Producing PDF with embedded 3D is currently not an easy task. As a solution to the problem we offer a freely available tool that makes embedding 3D in PDF documents an easy to use technology. Our solution is very flexible, extensible, and can be easily integrated with existing document workflow technology.