SketchFab and the Changing Landscape of 3D Data Platforms for Cultural Heritage and Natural History

[JulieWinchester]

Some of you may have already read about the recent news from Epic Games that SketchFab will be winding down, with some (but not all) content on SketchFab being migrated to a new platform named “Fab” sometime in October. This news has prompted some concern in the GLAM sector and from academic producers and consumers of 3D data pertaining to cultural heritage, natural history, and biological sciences. This concern is prompted in part because not all content on SketchFab is eligible for migration to Fab. Content licensed through non-commercial or sharealike Creative Commons licenses is ineligible for migration, and the fate of content that is licensed CC0 or set as private downloadable on SketchFab is also unknown. Yet more concern is also caused by the fact that Fab seems to lack many of the features that made SketchFab attractive for producers of cultural heritage and natural history 3D data, including tagging features, annotation support, view/download counts, and/or categorizing data as relating to cultural heritage as a category.

Members of the 3D data community are understandably concerned about the risk that large quantities of data currently on SketchFab may be effectively or actually orphaned.

MorphoSource shares these concerns. If large collections of 3D data representing cultural heritage and natural history go dark - or worse, are lost - this would be directly opposed to MorphoSource’s central mission. We are committed to working with the affected user communities to help find solutions to this problem, and we believe that MorphoSource is well poised to provide critical support. MorphoSource was created in part to provide 3D content creators with an archiving and distribution option that is non-profit, non-commercial, and 3D-specialized. Designed for 3D data, but supporting 2D and AV media as well, MorphoSource is also unparalleled in sophistication of features facilitating the efforts of data producers to preserve, manage, and provide nuanced access to data. In particular, MorphoSource’s mission is to support long-term archiving of data relevant to society, education, and research in a way where the continued existence of high-quality, well-curated data does not depend on changing conditions caused by shifts in profit incentives.

For any institutions, organizations, individual scholars, or other data producers who would like to see academic cultural heritage or natural history content currently on SketchFab moved to another platform, we are happy to extend our team’s assistance in shifting 3D data to MorphoSource. For individuals or groups with less than 100GB of data that fit this description, we can subsidize free data deposit to MorphoSource. For individuals or groups with 100GB to 1TB of data, we may also be able to subsidize the deposit of some or all of your collection, but we encourage you to reach out to our team to discuss your data. We are also able to offer direct assistance from our team with regards to facilitating the transfer of data from SketchFab or elsewhere to MorphoSource, locating and curating metadata, and for other purposes. If this is of interest to you, please reach out to our team at [email protected], add a comment to this news post, or feel free to make a MorphoSource account and check out the repository. All users can make an account, but you will need to specifically request contributor status in order to begin contributing data.

For users with material on SketchFab with label annotations, we are working on a solution for archiving annotation sets from SketchFab using the community standard IIIF Presentation API, and specifically the ongoing recent work to add 3D support and 3D scenes to IIIF tools. This solution may even be of use in situations where models are not stored on MorphoSource, though having data on MorphoSource will make this annotation solution easier and more seamless.

If you are curious for more details about MorphoSource, please see our documentation. Of particular interest may be the section About MorphoSource or our Contributor User Docs. For users interested in learning more about costs for large data deposits, see our documentation for Data Deposit Costs.

For reference, SketchFab to Fab announcement posts: 1, 2