427 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-044-0.ch021 Chapter 21 ARCO: Building Virtual Museum Exhibitions with Flex-VR Krzysztof Walczak Poznan University of Economics, Poland INTRODUCTION Cultural heritage as an application domain can largely benefit from the use of interactive 3D and virtual reality technologies. Most museums do not have the space and resources required to exhibit their whole collections. In addition, the nature and fragility of some of the objects prevent museum curators from making them available to the public. Also, the interaction of museum visitors with the exhibited artifacts is usually very restricted, e.g. they cannot look at the artifacts from all angles, compare artifacts or study them in different con- texts. In this respect, virtual reality technologies can offer great help. These technologies provide solutions that enable visualization of 3D digital models of museum artifacts in either purely virtual or digitally reconstructed environments. They also allow visitors to interact with the models in a variety of ways. Modern museums already exploit various multimedia technologies to attract visitors – both visitors coming to the museum in person and visi- tors on the Internet. For the first type of visitors museums prepare on-site interfaces, such as ki- osks, permitting them to browse through museums’ ABSTRACT In this chapter, a virtual museum exhibition system, called ARCO, is presented. ARCO enables museum staff to create, manage and display virtual exhibitions of museum artifacts in rich 3D and multimedia forms. Such exhibitions can be accessed both internally within the museums and remotely over the Internet. Due to the use of a novel approach to building confgurable virtual reality applications, called Flex-VR, virtual exhibitions in ARCO can be easily and quickly built by museum staff, even if they do not have experience in 3D design and programming. The chapter provides an overview of the ARCO system, a description of the virtual exhibition design process and examples of virtual exhibitions built with ARCO.