Digital Originals, FHNW School of Computer Science

Digital Originals advances the digitization of cultural heritage by combining state of the art 3D capture technologies with automated processing, adaptive streaming, and real time rendering. The project enables high fidelity, museum grade visual quality for interactive exploration of cultural artifacts—directly in the web browser.

By integrating complementary imaging techniques, Digital Originals achieves a new level of realism and detail in digital 3D models. Precise geometric representations, such as meshes and point clouds, are combined with extended texture and material information to create lifelike digital surrogates of physical objects. The project streamlines the entire workflow—from data acquisition and processing to distribution and visualization—ensuring consistent quality and scalability. In parallel, the project captures rich technical and material metadata, documenting the acquisition process and measurement quality to support accurate interpretation, research, and long term preservation.

For data acquisition, the project integrates cutting edge techniques such as Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), photogrammetry, and Gaussian Splatting. Automated capture processes ensure reproducibility, transparency, and explainability of the resulting datasets. All captured data is automatically post processed, compressed, and converted into efficient, streamable 3D formats, enabling real time visualization with the highest rendering quality on the web.

To address challenges related to storage, performance, and interaction with complex 3D models, Digital Originals develops modern file formats and adaptive streaming technologies, guided by open standards such as the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). For visualization and exploration, the project employs advanced rendering techniques, including physically based rendering, non photorealistic rendering, and Gaussian splatting.

Digital Originals opens new possibilities for museums, researchers, and educators to preserve, study, and share cultural heritage. The resulting digital artifacts enable detailed visual analysis, comparison of materials and techniques, identification of condition and damage, and new forms of interactive exploration, measurement, and documentation in virtual environments.