87DECEMBER 2011

ENTERTAINMENT COMPUTING

Published by the IEEE Computer Society0018-9162/11/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE

Museums at Your Fingertips

A lthough technology has permeated most of the entertainment world, some sectors are still

relatively technology-free. One such sector is the exhibition of pretech-nological artworks by museums, which tend to rely on the traditional approach of presenting the actual, physical piece in their display area.

In 2005, Brown University, Micro-soft, and the British Library began collaborating to develop a technolog-ical solution to enable museums to display huge artworks—on the order of 15,000 square feet—that would otherwise be inaccessible to casual museum-goers.

We needed to tackle a question museums strive to answer every day: How can we engage viewers and allow them to view and interact with ancient, priceless artworks in an intui-tive, educational manner?

Our goal was to create a system that would be extensible and easy to use, both for curators and viewers. The system needed to enable curators to easily create a digital exhibition of a series of large-scale artworks without

having to hire tech staff, and it needed to let museum-goers intuitively view and explore the artwork while partic-ipating in an engaging, entertaining experience.

Our solution, Large Artwork Dis-play on the Surface (LADS), is a museum display system that utilizes large, touchscreen technology.

PROJECT GOALSOne of our objectives with LADS

was to give museum-goers the enjoyment of browsing a collection of artworks chosen and arranged in a certain order by the curator, while also having the opportunity to view basic data related to each work.

To address these needs, we built a catalog viewer, a novel interface for viewing a small collection of large-scale artworks. As Figure 1 shows, the catalog viewer contains a fully interactive timeline on which the curator can arrange the pieces by the date each was created. Viewers can scale and zoom the timeline with standard touch gestures such as flick and pinch-zoom. Tapping an art-work selects it and displays relevant

data about the piece such as artist, medium, and title. Additionally, each artwork can be tagged with geo-graphic information, such as where it was created, the places it has been displayed, and where it is currently housed, which is shown on a fully interactive map in the center of the catalog.

LADS also lets museum-goers examine each artwork in great visual detail and explore a variety of addi-tional information related to the piece. Each work in the collection can be viewed within Artwork Mode, which uses a DeepZoom image (a tiled image pyramid) to display the piece at full resolution, no matter what the zoom level. This allows enormous images (on the order of 40 Gbytes) to be loaded and displayed at the level of detail of individual brushstrokes, enabling museum-goers to get closer to the artwork than ever before.

Additionally, LADS provides simple image manipulation tools imple-mented via pixel shaders that allow viewers to change the brightness, contrast, and saturation of a piece to examine details that would otherwise

Alexander Hills, Brown University

A museum display system utilizes touchscreen technology to create a digital exhibition of large-scale artworks, offering visitors an engaging, entertaining experience in which they can intuitively view and explore the exhibit.

COMPUTER 88

ENTERTAINMENT COMPUTING

piece longer, learning and investigat-ing more about it.

ENHANCING EDUCATIONOne of a curator’s goals when

devising an exhibition is to educate museum-goers, and there are few better ways to do that than by actu-ally talking to them. To enable this variety of interaction, LADS provides museum curators with a simple but powerful tool for creating guided tours through artworks. A guided tour permits direct communication so

that users don’t need to read lengthy explanations, which would prevent truly engaging with the piece.

At its core, the tour authoring system is a simplified video editor, with a few specific considerations. Our main goal behind developing the tool was to allow curators to create stunning, immersive digital exhibitions without requiring a tech staff to assist them.

Working toward that end, we decided to limit the tour authoring tools to only what was necessary to create a stunning tour. Curators can move the artwork and zoom in and out to focus on specific areas. They can bring up assets and manipulate them in the same fashion as the main artwork to, for instance, display a modern-day photograph of a castle depicted in paint.

We also provided tools to draw on the image. As Figure 4 shows, the curator can use these tools to circle areas of interest, enhance major com-positional divisions, or demonstrate the use of perspective. In addition to drawing tools, we developed a masking tool that allows covering areas with a translucent layer, draw-ing attention to other sections of the artwork.

TOUCHING THE FUTURELADS utilizes the power of modern

touchscreen technology to bring to the general public huge artworks that usually are restricted to the privileged few who can access a museum’s stor-age area. These enormous works are often the prized pieces of museums; enabling the public to view them pro-vides museums an added attraction to help them better compete in an infor-mation and media-saturated world.

Moreover, LADS brings a new level of intimacy to the museum experi-ence. Most museum-goers aren’t allowed to get closer than within a few feet of the artwork. With LADS, not only are they allowed to touch the image—they’re required to touch the pieces in order to learn more about

be hidden, such as signatures and visual cues. As Figure 2 shows, every piece can have assets associated with it—imagery and videos linked to the artwork can be loaded and viewed simultaneously to provide a broader context and framework for under-standing the piece. As Figure 3 shows, the artworks also have hotspots that allow viewers to see additional infor-mation specific to a certain part of the image. Hotspots give viewers a more dynamic, interactive experience and encourage them to stay with each

Figure 1. The catalog shows the artworks in the collection with basic information displayed at the top left and on the map.

Figure 2. Assets can be displayed and manipulated, showing the historical context for a piece.

Editor: Kelvin Sung, Computing and Software Systems, University of Washington, Bothell; ksung@u.washington.edu

89DECEMBER 2011

them. Individual brushstrokes are easy to see on a detailed screen, par-ticularly when museum-goers literally can put their noses up against the art.

Multiple museums in Italy are currently using LADS as a supplement to exhibitions celebrating the 150th anniversary of Italian unification. The Dunhuang Academy in northwestern China is also planning to use LADS to display its unique collection of ancient art treasures.

W ith these adoptions of LADS, the next question is easy to pose, but the

answers are endless: With powerful modern technology coming to art museums, the mainstays and exemplars of ancient society, what do we do next?

Alexander Hills is a master’s candi-date at Brown University, working in Andries van Dam’s Graphics Group, focused on UI/UX and HCI. Contact him at alexander_hills@brown.edu.

Selected CS articles and columns are available for free at http:// ComputingNow.computer.org.

Figure 3. LADS has hotspots that a curator can use to tag an artwork with location-specific information.

Figure 4. LADS tour authoring permits curators to create striking, educational tours through artworks.

IEEE Internet Computing reports emerging tools, technologies, and applications implemented through the Internet to support a worldwide computing environment.

For submission information and author guidelines, please visit www.computer.org/internet/author.htm

Engineering and Applying the Internet