ATON: An Open-Source Framework for Creating Immersive, Collaborative and Liquid Web-Apps for Cultural Heritage

The web and its recent advancements represent a great opportunity to build universal, rich, multi-user and immersive Web3D/WebXR applications targeting Cultural Heritage field--including 3D presenters, inspection tools, applied VR games, collaborative teaching tools and much more. Such opportunity although, introduces additional challenges besides common issues and limitations typically encountered in this context. The "ideal" Web3D application should be able to reach every device, automatically adapting its interface, rendering and interaction models--resulting in a single, liquid product that can be consumed on mobile devices, PCs, Museum kiosks and immersive AR/VR devices, without any installation required for final users. The open-source ATON framework is the result of research and development activities carried out during the last 5 years through national and international projects: it is designed around modern and robust web standards, open specifications and large open-source ecosystems. This paper describes the framework architecture and its components, assessed and validated through different case studies. ATON offers institutions, researchers, professionals a scalable, flexible and modular solution to craft and deploy liquid web-applications, providing novel and advanced features targeting Cultural Heritage field in terms of 3D presentation, annotation, immersive interaction and real-time collaboration.