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The study was realized in the context of a project aimed at transferring University research results to industry and started from a request of designing an engaging gesture-based interface for permitting people to buy goods in a public environment. The project was an occasion for focusing on several issues related to gestural interfaces, that are becoming popular but often suffer from poor usability. The solutions adopted for designing the prototype reflect some of the most interesting trends in research related to gestural interfaces and ubiquitous computing. An evaluation with a group of users gave us interesting feedbacks for improving our work

This work proposes a visual interface for querying sets of 3D worlds for the web, designed by different authors and annotated with both ontological top-down and social bottom-up styles. The goal is to overcome the current situation where most of these worlds are like independent islands that can be accessed only using the modalities that have been designed by their authors. Usually these worlds can't be searched, because there is no high level information associated to the 3D entities that compose them. Our proposal is based on a specification, a software architecture and a set of interfaces that permit a full exploitation of the geometric and textual information contained inside these 3D environments. The applications can be different, from the retrieval of single entities for localization purposes by end users to the retrieval of complex spatial patterns for functional or typological analyses by domain experts. A case study related to cultural heritage is presented

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This demo paper presents the set of visual interfaces designed by the authors in previous works as components of an ecosystem meant to accumulate and maximize the exploitation of annotated 3D information for the web. In particular the paper shows, through a case study related to cultural heritage, how the users can take advantage of this ecosystem of interfaces to shift seamlessly among different activities of searching, browsing and annotating a network of 3D worlds in the same work session. Such interweaving of activities characterizes the hypertextual web 2.0 but it is a novelty for the 3D domain and we expect that it may bring similar benefits in terms of information finding, reducing dead-ends during search and browsing, stimulating at the same time the users to contribute to the accumulation of further knowledge about the 3D entities stored