Voyager/HDV - 3d Viewer Testing

[Cook4986]

Smithsonian's Voyager 3D Viewer is now live on the demo dataverse:

https://demo.dataverse.org/dataverse/3DVT

Preliminary notes:

• Sketchfab exported (.glb) model textures aren't rendering
• Original, HDV-hosted .glbs are rendering correctly
• All embedded model viewers are showing "Missing Title", @gjcope
• Viewer navigation unwieldy (may be source model translation issue)

Overall, I'm satisfied with the rendering quality and the user experience, although there are lightweight alternatives to consider (e.g., three.js) Curious to hear your thoughts and ideas, @landreev @cmbz @jggautier @sbarbosadataverse @qqmyers @pdurbin @JulieWinchester @BeebBenjamin

[gjcope]

Hey @Cook4986 - My understanding from @qqmyers is that Dataverse is not currently supporting the Voyager scene file (https://smithsonian.github.io/dpo-voyager/document/overview/). This is where the titles, along with any content (annotations, audio, tours, etc.) are pulled from. If this is not planned, you could also configure the UI to display without the title (https://smithsonian.github.io/dpo-voyager/explorer/api-examples/ui-config/).

The navigation issue is because the object isn't centered on the origin. We chose to not do this automatically because we are sometimes working with multi-object scenes, objects that we don't want orbiting on their centers, etc. But the Voyager Story app has a simple one-click solution that allows you to center the model and orient however you would like. This positioning transform is also stored in the scene file though.

I'm really curious why the Sketchfab model textures aren't rendering and will follow up when I have a chance to take a look.

[gjcope]

Looks like Sketchfab is exporting the models with the "unlit" material extension which we don't seem to be supporting correctly. Should be an easy fix.

[pdurbin]

Thanks, it's nice to have some feeback after the initial roll out.

I agree it's annoying to see "missing title".

@gjcope I'm a little confused about what I can type in https://smithsonian.github.io/dpo-voyager/explorer/api-examples/ui-config/

Typing "none" works fine...

... and makes all UI elements go away. 😄 What would I type to get just the title to go away? 🤔

(Also, adding &uiMode=none to the URL at https://gdcc.github.io/dataverse-previewers/previewers/betatest/VoyagerPreview.html seems to work.)

[gjcope]

@pdurbin In that case you would build up the UI you want using the values referenced in the description shown in your screenshot, using "|" to concatenate options. So something like:

[jggautier]

Thanks for including me @Cook4986. All I can offer for now is that this looks really cool. I haven't been following this work and don't have experience with this tool and the goals here, so I can't offer any insights specifically about this tool.

About file previewers in general, I think we need to do a better job of preventing failures and failing more "gracefully". Could there be cases where the preview fails to load? And if that might happen, what would a person see?

[BeebBenjamin]

I don't have much to add to what has already been said. But I am interested in this so thanks for the tag. Seems like the textures are working now though, at least on the first set of models! They weren't earlier in the week. The origin is still off on the models, you can probably fix that in Blender. But Jamie's solution is probably worth trying first.

[Cook4986]

Thanks, @gjcope and @pdurbin. The model origin/centering issue makes sense (I'll work with our scanning team to implement a solution at the pre-processing stage), as does the limitations of our test with regards to the Voyager scene file. Will keep testing on this end and work with my Dataverse colleagues to determine a production implementation plan.