DynaMus: A fully dynamic 3D virtual museum framework

The evolving technologies of the game engines and the Web have reached a level of maturity that enables them to contribute significantly to the long-celebrated blending of culture and education with gaming. In this work, we present DynaMus, an innovative fully dynamic Web-based virtual museum framework that relies entirely on users' creativity and on the exploitation of the rich content in distributed Web resources. DynaMus is able to connect to popular repositories, such as Europeana and Google, and retrieve content that can be used in creating virtual exhibitions. It exploits modern Web technologies such as open linked data in an attempt to move towards the semantic Web by exploiting the abundance in data availability. DynaMus provides a complete authoring interface, in which anyone can easily create customised virtual exhibitions, while guaranteeing an engaging experience by relying on modern game engine technologies. The concept easily connects to educational settings as has been illustrated by case studies, one of which is presented in this paper.