The Web is Wide… and in 3D! 

Virginia Tech’s Advanced Research Computing is blazing new trails into the 3D Internet. At the 30th Annual ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Web3D Technologies, Dr. Nicholas Polys served as a General Co-Chair and Dr. Ayat Mohammed served as a Workshop and Tutorial Co-Chair. The conference was held from September 9-10 at the University of Siena Italy, in cooperation with the Web3D Consortium and EuroGraphics. The conference was also co-located with the 2025 Digital Heritage Congress (Sept 8-12). 

Through the Visionarium Lab and Virginia Tech’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, the ARC team continues to provide visualization innovation and support to the Virginia Tech community across multiple dimensions and domains. From the cutting edge Immersa Deck to consumer headsets to workstations, laptops, and mobiles, the ARC Visualization team enables researchers with the latest visualization and virtual reality tools, techniques, and horsepower. 

ARC held a strong presence at Web3D with numerous papers and presentations

This year, Virginia Tech Faculty and students made a splash on the 3D Web in several ways:

Peer-reviewed Papers: 

  • Nikhil Narra, Anuj Marisetty, Nicholas Polys, and Ben Sandbrook. 2025. A Generalized Web3D API for Metaverse Bookmarks. In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on 3D Web Technology (Web3D '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3746237.3746311
  • Nikhil Narra, Anuj Marisetty, Nicholas Polys, and Ben Sandbrook. 2025. X3Test: A Headless Browser-Based Framework for Automated Performance Benchmarking of X3D/X3DOM Scenes. In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on 3D Web Technology (Web3D '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3746237.3746315

Workshop Presentations:

  • Generative AI for 3D content
  • 3D Web Interoperability for the Metaverse

Tutorials:

  • Web3D Publishing Tools and Techniques

The Conference Program and presentations are online.

The ARC team also submitted 5 entries to the Web3D Metaverse Tools Competition and made a clean sweep! The Grand Prize was awarded to Nicholas Polys, Ayat Mohammed (ARC Computational Scientist), and Ben Sandbrook (ARC Systems Engineer) for their X3D Videosphere framework. Third Place went to the X3Test project from Computer Science MS. Eng graduates Nikhil Narra (2025) and Anjuj Marisetty (2025), and Nicholas Polys and Ben Sandbrook.

The X3D Image and Video spheres platform was developed and used in a number of Virginia Tech projects where ARC provided crucial collaboration and support:

  • Nicholas F. Polys, Peter Sforza, W. Cully Hession, and John Munsell. 2016. Extensible Experiences: Fusality for stream and field. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Web3D Technology (Web3D '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 179–180. https://doi.org/10.1145/2945292.2945320
  • Nicholas F Polys, Kathleen Meaney, John Munsell, and Benjamin J Addlestone. 2021. X3D Field Trips for Remote Learning. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on 3D Web Technology (Web3D '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 5, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3485444.3487647
  • Nazila Roofigari-Esfahan, Nicholas Polys, Ashley Johnson, Todd Ogle, and Ben Sandbrook. 2023. Immersive Cross-platform X3D Training: Elevating Construction Safety Education. In Proceedings of the 28th International ACM Conference on 3D Web Technology (Web3D '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 23, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3611314.3625830
  • N. F. Polys, A. Mohammed, A. Johnson and N. Roofigari-Esfahan, "The Value of Immersion in Co-Present, Collaborative Safety Review," 2025 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), Saint Malo, France, 2025, pp. 1697-1701, doi: 10.1109/VRW66409.2025.11045961.

Dr. Nicholas Polys is the Director of Visual Computing for ARC. He is also an Affiliate Professor of  Computer Science, on the Faculty of Health Science, and a Fellow in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction. Dr. Polys was recently named the Department Editor and founder of the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications column, @theSource. 

Universty Libraries and the Digital Heritage Congress 

At the 2025 Digital Heritage Congress, VT Libraries also presented a paper: 

''Out There,'' Anywhere: Digital Proxies for Threatened Cultural Heritage Sites and Structures     Deisa, Eva, Tucker, Sarah, Kinnaman, Alex, Ogle, Todd. The Eurographics Association. Digital Heritage;  https://doi.org/10.2312/dh.20253285  

Virginia Tech University Libraries faculty members Eva Deisa, Sarah Tucker, Alex Kinnaman, and Todd Ogle presented a paper on phase 1 of a multimodal project to capture local artist Charlie Brouwer’s Sculpture Trail located outside of Floyd, VA. Mr. Brouwer is a celebrated sculptor and artist and maintains dozens of wooden sculptures on a mile-long trail surrounding his property. As a permanent outdoor installation of wooden sculptures, the sculptures themselves are at risk of deterioration and require ongoing upkeep by the artist. The collaborators saw an opportunity to capture the trail and other pieces of Mr. Brouwer’s work holistically to preserve the look, feel, and experience of the trail to increase the accessibility and enjoyment of an otherwise remote location. 

Attending Digital Heritage 2025 and Web3D 2025 provided an opportunity to position this project in conversation with other XR and immersive environment projects also navigating the interactive preservation of remote, fragile, and large-scale cultural heritage, such as the creation of high-resolution 3D models of Armenian gravestones (Andrianov et al) and the comparative work between LiDAR, GANs, and Gaussian splatting for challenging surfaces (Edwards et al). Sharing strategies for capture, methodology, and presentation furthers the cohesion of this project’s benchmarks to align with similar efforts, and contributes to the conversation with the unique integration of oral history alongside object capture, and strategies for long-term preservation and data management.