Getting Started with 3D for the Web

At Virginia Tech Libraries we’ve begun to experiment with 3D virtual collections. It’s been a process, but the content we’re creating is improving and we’re starting to hit our stride. This talk will revisit some of the lessons we’ve learned in developing three different 3D collections. We’ll discuss object scanning/photograpy, model generation and editing, as well as lessons learned in coding front end viewers in Javascript. We plan to discuss common pitfalls that we fell hard into, like mistakenly thinking of the 3D canvas in the same way that we think of the DOM, and the challenge of handling content from different partners. How could we go about scaling the models in an entomology collection correctly with the same code that we plan to use for an archaeology collection that has models approaching the size of five soccer fields? We’ve hit a lot of roadblocks and we’d like to try to help others avoid them as they get going.