museum visitor mobile interface: pure pan and zoom

[Clayton H Lewis]

(from the tuesday iphone phone meeting... the spirit of this and  
other suggestions is to explore interesting extremes in the design  
space on the way to choosing a more sane direction)

inspiration: the DataLand concept of the MIT Media Lab... see some  
discussion at http://www.starhill.us/spatialdataland.html

the concept: the visitor's access to all info is via a generalized  
map... documents, multimedia, etc, are all "in" the map, and are  
viewed by zooming in far enough that they can be read (in the  
implementation what actually happens is that the data representation  
is switched based on where you are zooming and how much... for  
example, in the original Dataland demo when you zoomed in on eg a map  
of Europe it would switch to a country map at a given degree of zoom,  
then to a city map, and so on... in a view at room scale you might  
see the cover of a report, then when you zoomed in you'd see the text  
inside, and so on)

scenario: user fires up Web page on entry to museum... they see a map  
of the entire museum space... when they enter a gallery they can zoom  
in and see larger representations of the exhibits... to get  
background on a particular exhibit they pan/zoom to it, and can see  
documents and/or multimedia near the exhibit, in the map...by panning/ 
zooming to one of these it becomes large enough to read... to move on  
to another exhibit they zoom out, pan over, and zoom in again

gallery theme information and subtheme information would be  
represented in the map by objects (say documents) shown in the middle  
of the gallery, or in other open floor space... these materials would  
be viewed as desired in the same manner as other material



Clayton Lewis
Professor of Computer Science
Scientist in Residence, Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities
University of Colorado
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~clayton



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