Online Museum, a proof of concept

Purpose: to demonstrate a display paradigm developed to allow people to access images and information about museum artifacts by way of the internet in a manner that is both intuitive and easy to learn.

Paradigm: is the familiar "museum" of rooms with displayed artifacts. The internet visitor can navigate from room to room, look around the rooms and get details about artifacts by hovering or clicking the mouse on the artifact.

Technology: this technology will work in any modern browser with javascript enabled. The current proof of concept works best with monitor resolution set to at least 1280 x 1024 and has been tested using the open source FireFox browser. None of these technologies require any additional plug-ins. All of the authoring software has been developed with multi-lingual projects in mind.

The demonstrations:

Interactive Photography: An interactive photograph is one where you can mouse over objects and receive extra information or other photographs of those objects. Also, some objects can be clicked to either move to a different interactive photograph or to a web page with more information about the object.

Virtualized Gallery: takes an existing gallery and virtualizes it so that an internet visitor can move about the gallery, look more closely at the art and find out information about the art. This concept would also work with "staged" rooms that would have art hung, be photographed, and then be cleared to be re-hung with different art and re-photographed, etc., creating a series of rooms full of art that the internet visitor could then navigate through.

Virtual Gallery: displays existing flat art on the walls of a non-existant gallery. The rooms of the gallery are computer generated and photographs of the art are rendered in the virtual rooms. The rooms are then treated as interactive photographs so that the art and information about it can be viewed by the internet visitor.

Feedback

To date, this paradigm has been beta-tested by an audience of about one hundred people of widely differing ages and backgrounds, including the aged, the disabled and home-schooling enthusiasts. It would be fair to say that this display paradigm has proved itself effective at getting information across while providing the sort of amusement that keeps users' attention and draws them back to the site again and again.