A virtual exhibition is a collection of electronic artifacts and information resources -virtually anything which can be digitalized. The collection may include paintings, drawings, photographs, diagrams, graphs, recordings, video segments, newspapers articles, transcripts of interviews, numerical databases and host other items which may be saved on the virtual museums file server. It may also offer pointers to great resourses around the world relevant to the museum´s main focus.
The virtual reality is an effective way to convey educational contents, especially in the cultural heritage field. Nevertheless, its diffusion in e-learning is not as common as one would expect. The main reasons can be found in the complexity for the development of virtual environments and in the users' difficulties for a comfortable navigation of the scenes. We propose a Web-based authoring system that enables people with skills on technologies, to define and generate their customized virtual exhibitions. Moreover, in the generated environments a specific navigational paradigm is adopted: it is conceived as a multimodal enhancement of guided tours, allowing us to improve the navigation of the scenes.
(Costagliola, 2003)