DFG-3D-Viewer – Development of an infrastructure for digital 3D reconstructions

An important element in digital 3D reconstruction, in the fields of archeology, art and architecture history, is the subsequent visualization of the result (Messemer, 2016). The standardization of the documentation and publication is seen as the most important priority across the board (Cieslik, 2020). Widely established 3D repositories with integrated 3D visualization such as Sketchfab (https:// sketchfab.com/) belong to a commercial offer, while 3D viewers introduced by scientific institutions like Kompakkt (https://kompakkt.de/home) or by other research projects like patrimonium.net (Dworak, Kuroczyński, 2016) have still not provided approved and applied standards for the documentation and publication of 3D models in the field of hypothetical 3D reconstruction of art and architecture. Against this background, the project “DFG 3DViewer - Infrastructure for digital 3D reconstructions” was launched, which the goal is to provide an offer of permanent infrastructure for decentralized web-based display of models in the DFG 3D-Viewer and in suitable Virtual Research Environments (VRE), accompanied by low threshold interface usage (http://dfg-viewer.de/en/dfg-3d-viewer). The work presented here concerns the results of the first phase 117 Digital Humanities 2022 of the project including the definition of documentation standards for web-based 3D publication of the digital reconstruction models and the development of the webbased 3D-viewer for digital datasets as a minimal-effort plugin. Proposed solution considers a generic approach with adaptability and reusability (Münster, 2019), respects FAIR principles (https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/) and follows existing DFG (German Research Foundation) standards (https://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/ principles_dfg_funding/good_scientific_practice/ index.html).