A 3D Digital Art Gallery on Android for Preserving Biak Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Cultural heritage preservation in Papua is constrained by uneven internet connectivity and by the scarcity of interactive media that carry local cultural knowledge. This article reports the design and analysis of Biak Art Gallery, an Android application that presents nine cultural objects of the Biak-Numfor people as interactive three-dimensional (3D) models with bilingual (Indonesian and English) cultural information. Following a design science research approach, I analyse a software artefact comprising 1,940 lines of Java and Kotlin, nine GLB assets totalling 21.5 MB, and an application-integrity module. The resulting architecture separates content data, user interface, and rendering engine: a static, embedded content repository; the Filament engine, accessed through the SceneView library, loading GLB files directly from application assets; and a single Kotlin wrapper class that hides Jetpack Compose from the Java code. All cultural content is available offline, while application authenticity is verified through layered local checks and the Google Play Integrity API. Each model contains 59,012–80,000 triangles and weighs 2.03–2.83 MB, so the full asset set (about 26.8 MB including background audio) can still be bundled in a single application package. User testing, on-device performance profiling, and validation of the content by customary leaders have not yet been carried out and remain future work. The article offers a replicable design pattern for community-based cultural preservation applications in regions with limited connectivity.