DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF AN ONLINE 3D VIRTUAL EXHIBITION SYSTEM by Faxing Chen Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Liming Zhang Master of Science in E-Commerce Technology With the development of the exhibition industry and information technology, virtual exhibition get more and more popular. Online 3D Virtual exhibition (VE) is beginning as one of the hottest research area in the virtual reality (VR) literature and content management system (CMS). One important issue lies in VE is how to build the VE system easily and update the 3D model of product quickly. Traditionally, building VE system is time-consuming and very expensive, organizer need to hire a professional team to implement the VE system. On the other hand, the tradition VE system has its own weaknesses. Firstly, the visitor need to install plugins to view the the VE environment, it result in a bad user experience. Secondly, the exhibitor can not change or update the 3D model without the help of professional people, under such circumstances, the exhibition organizer will undertake all the works to implement the VE system. In this thesis , to address the problems above, we proposes a novel virtual exhibition design concept – online 3D virtual reality exhibiton authoring with user-generated 3D contents. There are four major advantages of the system. Firstly, no 3D engine plug-in is needed for the virtual exhibition visitors to surfer the virtual exhibition view web browser. They can use the normal web browsers to surf the VE environment. Secondly, no advanced professional training is needed to build product 3D model. Non-IT-professional exhibitors can build 3D models for their own exhibition products through the platform provided by the public, the VE system is desgined to compatible with the 3D result generated by the public platform, furthermore, the exhibitors can decorate the booth with their own preference. Thirdly, there is no need to hire a professional team to implement the VE system, the organizer will has the ability to customize the VE system with an adaptive authoring tool provided by the system. Fourthly, the online 3D virtual exhibition environment is autogenerated based on the authoring and decoration, the online 3D virtual exhibition environment is produced collaboratively by the organizer and exhibitor.