The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Theatre Department at the University of Maryland in College Park worked together in 2009-10 to create CAMP, a Collaborative, Ajax-Based, Modeling Platform. As the name suggests, this tool is an open source, collaborative, 3-dimensional modeler that will allow users with very little experience to generate a 3-dimensional model in their web browser which they can then allow other users to both view and edit. The tool was initially used to construct an international database of pre-nineteenth century theater buildings, but was designed to be intentionally generic so that scholars interested in structures of any sort can easily port it into their own projects.
CAMP is innovative in its web-based, collaborative approach to 3-dimensional modeling, a difficult activity for which there are few tools in or outside of the digital humanities. Until about ten years ago, the average home computer could only process multimedia files relatively slowly, and file sizes and bandwidth speeds prevented the web from being a feasible platform for working with anything other than text and small images. These technical constraints have now largely vanished; however, work in the digital humanities has yet to catch up with the technical possibilities. The digital humanities remain a largely text-centric field in which most of the largest and best-funded projects in are still those for which a text, usually a significant literary or historical text, is paramount.