An Efficient GPU Approach for Designing 3D Cultural Heritage Information Systems López, Luis Torres, Juan Carlos Arroyo, Germán Cano, Pedro Martín, Domingo 3D information systems Information layers 3D models 3D digitisation GPU programming This article is just a preprint. For the full article, visit this website: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1296207418307167?via%3Dihub We propose a new architecture for 3D information systems that takes advantage of the inherent parallelism of the GPUs. This new solution structures information as thematic layers, allowing a level of detail independent of the resolution of the meshes. Previous proposals of layer based systems present issues, both in terms of performance and storage, due to the use of octrees to index information. In contrast, our approach employs two-dimensional textures, highly efficient in GPU, to store and index information. In this article we describe this architecture and detail the GPU algorithms required to edit these layers. Finally, we present a performance comparison of our approach against an octree based system. 2025-01-15T11:37:08Z 2025-01-15T11:37:08Z 2018 preprint Journal of Cultural Heritage, Volume 41, January–February 2020, Pages 142-151 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/99240 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2019.05.003 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional Journal of Cultural Heritage (preprint)