Bridging Spatiotemporal Scales: A Hybrid Web3D Framework for History Education

Web3D technologies enable global access to cultural heritage, yet online digital museums struggle to present vast macroscopic contexts alongside high-fidelity artifacts without disorienting users. We propose a lightweight Web-based visualization framework that bridges 2-D spatiotemporal maps and 3-D inspections through a dual-camera FSM and a "render-to-texture" visual anchor. This anchor projects the macrocontext into the 3-D space, preserving spatial cognition during seamless transitions. A prototype, "The Digital Silk Road," is implemented using HTML5 and WebGL. A within-subjects user study ($N=24$N=24) shows the framework reduces navigation errors by 55% and task time by 32% (Cohen's $d > 1.3$d>1.3) versus traditional click-and-load designs. Technical benchmarks confirm 78-88 FPS on consumer hardware with negligible overhead. The system aligns with Information-Rich Virtual Environment theory, maps to X3D standards, and offers a scalable solution for presenting heterogeneous heritage data on the Web.