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Virtual Wing

admin — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:13:21 +0000

The Virtual Wing is intended to be used as a means for one who wants to navigate, virtually, through the exhibits of a museum. Visitors will be able to select one of the available virtual rooms of the museum and examine the showcases and items that are accommodated there. The exhibits, apart from text, are accompanied with multimedia content such as photos, video and audio. As well as being a useful source of information about the museum resources, the Virtual Wing also plays an educational role. The museum is organized into rooms with thematic sections. These sections have a number of showcases which are clusters of related items according to diverse archaeological criteria. The above categorization of the available exhibitions leads us to a constructive hierarchy which will be of great value for visitors, enabling them to understand the function and the utility of the exhibitions. This hierarchy is also adopted by the Virtual Wing when representing the cultural content of the museum. It should be noted that the system supports the existence of as many languages (e.g. Greek, English, French) and audience types (e.g. adults, children, archaeologists) as the museum administration prefers to add.

Projection Room

admin — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:13:12 +0000

Τhe Projection Room Application aims to enhance cultural knowledge discovery by increasing access to museums’ digital content through a system that supports the creation and projection of presentations for Museum’s exhibits. The presentations may include text describing and commenting on museum’s collection, images of the exhibits, photographs from the excavations sites, sound and video.

The system provides much functionality satisfying the needs of Museum’s archaeologists, tour guides – instructors and visitors. Depending on the group ones belong, has different privileges on the use of the system.

The Museum staff is able to create presentations from scratch utilizing the appropriate information stored in the Museum database. They have a full access to the system.
The instructors or tour guides have less privileges than the museum’s archaeologists. They can create presentations by using the presentations already created by the Museum’s archaeologists.
Finally, a simple visitor can view a presentation that is already created by the other two groups of users. Of course, both Museum staff and instructors/tour guides can view the presentations already stored in the system.

The presentations can be attended either inside the museum or even outside of it e.g. in schools during a preparation class prior to a museum visit.

Mobile Tour Application

admin — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:02:18 +0000

The Mobile Tour Application provides a virtual guide to the Museum’s visitors. It utilizes UHF RFID technology to build a convenient mobile museum guide. Its user interface is pleasant and easy for the users and it does not require any computer skills. The handheld device is a computer of light weight with a touch screen. It is also equipped with an UHF RFID reader to recognize and distinguish between the Museum exhibits. All museum’s showcases are equipped with RFID tags in order to link exhibits with the corresponding multimedia information stored to the museum’s data repository. The user has just to level at the chick sign of a particular item and its description appears on the device screen along with its image. Also, there appear links to audio and video material and images of relative museum’s items.

Mobile Tour contains a set of predefined tours in the museum, composed by the archaeologists to emphasize on a specific thematic entity of the museum. Besides the preset tours, the user has the ability to create her/his own walks in the museum, using certain criteria according to their profile; time available, class of the artifact (e.g., pottery, tools, coins, etc.), era and excavation site (only for experts) are the search criteria. In both tour types, the route is drawn with a red line and the exhibits of interest are marked as green points while user’s position is marked as a blue point.

Finally, the application includes an interactive search and find game, composed by a specialized to educational programs archeologist, where young visitors should locate and mark showcases relative to specific thematic area etc.