An Integrative Tool Chain for Collaborative Virtual Museums in Immersive Virtual Environments

Various conceptual approaches for the creation and presentation of virtual museums can be found. However, less work exists that concentrates on collaboration in virtual museums. The support of collaboration in virtual museums provides various benefits for the visit as well as the preparation and creation of virtual exhibits. This paper addresses one major problem of collaboration in virtual museums: the awareness of visitors. We use a Cave Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE) for the visualization of generated virtual museums to offer simple awareness through co-location. Furthermore, the use of smartphones during the visit enables the visitors to create comments or to access exhibit related metadata. Thus, the main contribution of this ongoing work is the presentation of a workflow that enables an integrated deployment of generic virtual museums into a CAVE, which will be demonstrated by deploying the virtual Leopold Fleischhacker Museum.