A flexible framework to personalize 3D web users experience

International audienceNowadays, Web 3D is reaching a new milestone thanks to the convergence of various technologies including new Web standards (such as HTML 5 and WebGL), new device controllers to ease 3D navigation and interaction (Natal Project®, Wiimote®, ...) and home 3D displays. Despite these new factors, the lack of efficient and high level authoring tools to ease the creation and reduce the production cost of Web 3D interfaces is still a strong impediment to the large scale use of Web 3D contents. In this article, we present a framework based on current websites design pipeline that is distinguished by content management, graphic charter design and interface design. Moreover, our solution must reach a sufficient level of flexibility in terms of extensibility, of modularity, of genericity of input and output file formats, as well as of range of interfaces potentially feasible by designers. Thus we propose a software environment allowing metaphor-based information presentation, taking into consideration both the data structure (how the user explores and discovers data) and the visual aspect of the computed environment (the geometry and data representation). These metaphors may be used to visualize large volumes of information coming from databases or classic/semantic search results. The created environments may be highly varying, from 3D interfaces to 3D worlds inside which the user can navigate with an avatar and interact with other users. Various examples are given to illustrate the flexibility of the technique