About

Throughout the last years digital content has gained importance also in cultural heritage institutions. Video and picture material is being digitized to manage the amount of content with ease. The digital data can be administered with databases and allows the addition of meta information as well as manipulation of certain media (e.g. dust and flicker reduction on historic film material). The digitized versions of film and audio documents and digital images of objects (paintings, statues, architecture …) can also be used to attract a larger audience by making available previews of exhibitions on the web. One step further would be to give the possibility to walk through virtual tours online. Those tours represent the real world exhibition to a certain extent. The visitor at home can experience a guided tour as though they would at a museum.

As there used to be no author-friendly editor for developing such exhibitions curators at the Technisches Museum Wien and developers from the Institute of Information Systems of JOANNEUM RESEARCH have designed a prototype to fill this need. This prototype has recently evolved into a fully fledged authoring tool. Through a graphical user interface, even users with basic computer skills are able to develop complex exhibition spaces easily. The most common formats of arbitrary digital objects such as texts, pictures, sounds and movies can be placed on maps that correspond to virtual rooms. Visitor interactions and guided tours can thus be modeled easily.