zoom interface mockup

[Clayton H Lewis]

There's a very crude mockup of a pan and zoom interface posted at  
http://spot.colorado.edu/~clayton/fluid%20stuff/zoom%20mockup/ 
planview.html

If you view it on an iPhone, you can see:

*that you can pan around and zoom in
*that you can select (some of the) galleries... the only one w any  
content is the American gallery
*that you then get a view that shows mostly works (hypothetically) in  
that gallery
*that you can pan and zoom in that view
*that you can click on a work to get more info

*in addition to works, there are a couple of other things you can  
select:
    *an "about" box that has some info about the exhibit in the  
gallery as a whole
    * the director's signature, marking a work that has been selected  
as one of the "Director's Dozen"... selecting this gives you the  
director's comment on that work

*when you select a work in a couple of cases you get a picture of the  
artist that you can select to get biographical info

the overall interaction roughly approximates the mode on interaction  
in the Media Lab Dataland concept of long ago. the difference is that  
you can't just zoom in the mockup, you have to select, and as a  
result you can't just zoom back out and pan over to read about the  
next work .... I intend to try to refine the mockup by using the  
iPhone zoom control to trigger automatic selection and automatic  
return from a selection, which would give a much better approximation  
to the Dataland model... the idea is that when you zoom in past a  
certain extent, you actually follow a link to a different page, with  
different content... when you zoom out on such a page to a certain  
extent you are taken back to the parent page... don't know yet the  
extent to which that can be done

my impressions from the experiment so far:

one can work with a fair number of controls like these on the iPhone  
screen
the arrangement and number of works in a real gallery would require  
some liberties with the actual geometry that might reduce the value  
of this kind of presentation (by making it hard to find a certain  
work, tell where you are, etc)

the layout for the individual works is bad... I haven't been able to  
get the html to divvy up the screen space in the way I want, which  
would initially be equally divided horizontally between image and text

for an in-museum experience could be one would want even less space  
devoted to the images, by default, because you can look at the real  
thing (though for seeing what's where in the museum one would want to  
be able to get a reasonable size image since some of the works you'd  
want to be able recognize would be in galleries you aren't in at the  
moment)



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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