ATON framework: create immersive, collaborative and cross-device Web3D/WebXR apps for Cultural Heritage

Hi THREE community!

ATON is an open-source framework based on THREE.js and Node.js to create liquid Web3D/WebXR apps (presenters, applied games, tools, collaborative experiences…) targeting the Cultural Heritage domain.

It adopts a ‘develop once, deploy everywhere’ approach, with navigation system (orbit + first person), interaction model and UI automatically adapting to mobile, desktop and immersive XR devices.

It embraces modern web standards, including glTF, Cesium 3D Tiles (multiresolution), WebXR and many others. It is fairly easy to deploy and it also offers advanced semantic annotation & measurements tools, efficient 3D queries, viewpoint transitions, real-time collaborative multi-user features, an event-driven API for custom logic and much more.

You can dig more into the full architecture of the framework and use cases here (open-access research paper)

The framework (born in 2016) has greatly evolved during these years, thanks to several national and international projects, and indeed is still under development.

Special thanks go to this great community and its support - and to amazing open-source projects like NASA AMMOS 3D Tiles Renderer, THREE Mesh BVH, THREE Mesh UI and many others that made all this possible.

Here is one of the latest videos showing the recent integration of WebXR + multiresolution + SpatialUI components (immersive annotations/measurements) on a few sample 3D datasets:

For those interested, on github you can find other useful links (website, examples, tutorials, API docs, telegram open-group, etc…). More tutorials and how-tos coming soon!

1 Like