Towards a Collaborative Authoring Tool for Cultural Heritage Applications: Modelling the Development Process Between Curators and Developers.

Abstract

Both museums and virtual museums go through a curation process for creating exhibitions, with a variety of methods available. These are often collaborative, requiring both cultural heritage professionals and designers or developers working together. Mixed reality has the potential to enhance this process for the developer and client, in the form of a collaborative mixed reality authoring tool. It is important to understand the process of collaborative development of cultural heritage applications so that the authoring tool could be designed to cater for these needs. In this paper, a user study is presented that analyses the process of delivering three cultural heritage projects by an experienced development company. As a result, a model that captures project stages and collaborative aspects with the clients is created and validated, existing bottlenecks are identified and three authoring tool concepts that could improve the process are generated and discussed. The resulting tool is proposed to aid the collaboration process during the prototype and initial design stages of the development process, which will aid future research.