ATON 3.0 framework

Official ATON website | Telegram open-group | Live examples |

ATON framework - designed, developed and coordinated by B. Fanini (CNR ISPC, ex ITABC) - allows to create scalable, collaborative and cross-device 3D Web-Apps (mobile, desktop and immersive VR) targeting Cultural Heritage exploiting modern web standards, without any installation required for final users. ATON offers:

• Responsive, adaptive and scalable presentation of interactive 3D content (mobile, desktop PCs, museum kiosks, immersive VR devices)
• Real-time collaborative multi-user features (Photon component)
• Immersive VR (WebXR) for 3-DOF and 6-DOF devices
• Multi-resolution for massive 3D datasets through OGC standards
• Multi-touch interfaces
• Spatial UI (3D labels, buttons, etc...) targeting immersive XR sessions
• Built-in navigation modes, including orbit, first-person, device-orientation and immersive VR
• 3D semantic annotations including free-form volumetric shapes
• Fast, real-time 3D queries on visible and semantic graphs and UI nodes
• Built-in front-end ("Hathor") with WYSIWYG rich HTML5 content editor
• Built-in profiler (automatically adapt 3D presentation to different devices)
• Built-in services to access 3D collections and scenes for multiple users via authentication
• Built-in export of 3D scenes/models using different formats (gltf/glb, obj, usd,...) right from the browser
• Event-driven API for fully customizable events (local and synchronous collaborative contexts)
• 360 panoramas and virtual tours
• Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) for advanced materials and custom shaders for complex representations, including latest extensions
• Advanced lighting, including IBL and multiple Light Probes
• Camera/POV transitions, viewpoint handling and custom navigation constraints
• Complex scene-graph manipulation, hierarchical culling, instancing, composition and cascading transformations
• Scalable deployment, from low-cost SBCs (e.g. Raspberry Pi) to large infrastructures
• Multi-temporal (4D) visualization
• Easily extensible through plug&play apps architecture and plugins

The framework also provides a built-in front-end and services based on Node.js for deployment on servers, infrastructures or single-board computers; real-time collaborative multi-user features and support for remote/immersive visual analytics.

Getting started (quick)

1. Install Node.js for your operating system.

2. Install (or update) required modules from main ATON folder by typing:

npm install

3. Deploy ATON main service on local machine simply using:

npm start

4. Open http://localhost:8080 on your browser.

Citation

You can cite ATON framework using this open-access publication with the following BibTeX entry:

@article{fanini2021aton,
  title={ATON: An Open-Source Framework for Creating Immersive, Collaborative and Liquid Web-Apps for Cultural Heritage},
  author={Fanini, Bruno and Ferdani, Daniele and Demetrescu, Emanuel and Berto, Simone and d’Annibale, Enzo},
  journal={Applied Sciences},
  volume={11},
  number={22},
  pages={11062},
  year={2021},
  publisher={Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute}
}

or - as software - using the Zenodo DOI with the following BibTeX entry:

@software{aton2020_4618387,
  author       = {Bruno Fanini},
  title        = {ATON framework},
  year         = 2020,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {3.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.4618387},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4618387}
}

Publications

Main bibliographical reference (open access) of the framework is:

Fanini, B., Ferdani, D., Demetrescu, E., Berto, S., & d’Annibale, E. (2021). ATON: An Open-Source Framework for Creating Immersive, Collaborative and Liquid Web-Apps for Cultural Heritage. Applied Sciences, 11(22), 11062.

You can find here a complete list of publications where ATON was employed in different national and international projects.

Contribute

You are more than welcome to contribute to the project by spotting bugs/issues and providing code or solutions through pull requests to fix or improve ATON functionalities (see TODO list below). Get in touch here on github, through the telegram open-group or through the other channels.

TODO list

• Move and refactor 2D user interface routines from ATON.FE into ATON.UI component (2D labels, popup system, input search, etc.)
• Rewrite Hathor UI elements using new routines from ATON.UI.*
• Improve main landing page (public gallery), port to ejs and provide more customization
• New REST API (v2)
• Rewrite Shu using ejs
• Improve Shu UI (e.g. new scene, galleries) using new routines from ATON.UI