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World Culture Hub 3d

The World Culture Hub has originated as a project in the 3d Internet world of Second Life. The technical limitations of this platform and the considerable hosting costs, however, have caused us to start work on an own 3d project for the Web, using Babylon.js as the rendering engine. Contrary to Second Life this requires no seperate viewer software and can be accessed with any major standard webbrowser.

Click here to view the latest update from March 16th

  • We have made some progress that with our starting location, the Persian Garden. It’s not an in-depth recreation but in layout and architecture somewhat inspired by the famous Fin Garden in Kashan, Iran. For this update we have solved the problem of setting up reflection maps and realistic water materials.

3d modelling is by Hayden S. Nyland. Programming and administration are by Michael K. Iwoleit.

We recommend using the Google Chrome webbrowser to view this content. It has the best WebGL performance of the browsers that we have tested. The first webbrowsers with GPU support (WebGPU standard) are available and we are already testing the WebGPU mode in Babylon.js, hoping for a significant improvement of the rendering performance of our project.

We have tried to keep the handling as easy as possible:

    • After the page has loaded, first click into the viewport.
    • To move around resp. move the camera, use the WASD keys as in many computer games:  
      • W : move forward
      • S : move backward
      • A : turn left
      • D : turn right
    • To move the camera up and down use the PageUp and PageDown keys. 
    • Please note that the camera is subject to artificial gravity. After it has been lifted, it will slowly sink back down to the ground.
    • You can also change the viewing and moving direction by holding the left mouse button and dragging left and right.

The download and rendering of a scene may take a little time. Once the download is completed, however, the rendering engine should run smoothly on any fairly recent hardware.

Further information about updates and the conception of our 3d world will be posted here regularly.