The 3D-COFORM project will advance the state-of-the-art in 3D-digitisation and make 3D-documentation an everyday practical choice for digital documentation campaigns in the cultural heritage sector.

The project addresses all aspects of 3D-capture, 3D-processing, the semantics of shape, material properties, metadata and provenance, integration with other sources (textual and other media); search, research and dissemination to the public and professional alike.

A strong technical research program is complemented by research into practical business aspects: business models for exploitation of 3D assets, workflow planning and execution for mass digitisation, socio-economic impact assessment; and above all the creation of a Virtual Centre of Competence in 3D digitisation.

The VCC-3D will act as a catalyst in enhancing the sector’s capacity for mass digitisation of 3D assets – the tangible artefacts of the physical cultural heritage of the world. The 3D-COFORM consortium brings together 19 partners, mainly former core partners in the EPOCH NoE, to form a world class team on 3D-digitisation complemented by an equally prestigious group of Cultural Heritage organizations, with the Victoria and Albert Museum as a full partner and signed-up collaborations from the Louvre, the Florentine Museums authority the Museum of the Imperial Forums in Rome; World Heritage Sites in Cyprus and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The consortium also contains organizations tasked at a national level with helping museums move in these directions. C2RMF, the research arm of the French National Museums and CULTNAT the digitisation body for cultural and natural heritage funded by the Egyptian Government. All these institutions have a declared intention to develop their 3D-digitisation capability in order to move forward on the integration of these assets into the infrastructure that is being enabled by initiatives such as Europeana.