Museum Browsing Example




We have developed a novel interactive viewer called PhotoTags for browsing collections of tagged photographs. Its interface was developed using Macromedia Flash 8 and programmed using ActionScript 2.0. When the user selects a photo, the viewer shows the photo with all its tags. The detected visible tags are shown in green, while the projected occluded and outside-view tags are shown in red and blue, respectively.

As shown in (a), the list of the tagged objects appears on the right and a slider with all the photos in the folder appears at the bottom. When the user rolls over a tag, a brief description is displayed. As shown in (b), if the user clicks on the Egyptian vase, a detailed description of the vase and a thumbnail of its best view (in which the object appears closest to the center of the image) are displayed on the right. On choosing the thumbnail of the best view, it appears at higher resolution in the main window of the viewer, as shown in (c). At the same time, the slider automatically gets reordered according to the proximity of the object’s tag to the center of the view. This allows the user to select the next best view of the same object, as shown in (d).

By clicking on the outside-view blue tag for the Nefertiti bust seen in Figure 10(d), details about the bust and its best view can be seen, as shown in (e). The red tag in this view of the bust corresponds to a clay vase that is occluded by the bust. Clicking on this tag brings up an unobstructed view of the vase, as shown in (f). This view includes a painting by Monet. All the photos with Monet paintings can be found by using the search box at the top right corner of the viewer. The search results are ordered according to the number of times the desired object appears in the photo, as shown in (g). By clicking on one of the search results, one can view it at higher resolution in the main window, as shown in (h).