An XML-based scene description language for 3D virtual museum

Virtual exhibition of museum plays an important role in education and popular science; yet a majority of current virtual reality technologies vary in the shortage of constructing a low-cost, desktop-based and networked 3D virtual museum. The paper proposes an XML-based scene description language for 3D virtual museum — XVM to meet the characteristics and requirements of 3D virtual museum. Based on the principle of separating the virtual environment and collection models, XVM effectively utilizes digital information of collection resources and reduces the network throughput to a certain extent. A virtual museum authoring and navigating system has been successfully implemented and applied in practice.