Virtual Museum Interface: A New Way to Tour Online

Last week, I and two other interns had started to brainstorm a new design for the portion of the Museum’s website that gives site visitors a virtual tour of the Museum. After receiving approval from the Museum staff overseeing our project, we started to work on implementing the new design.

The idea that we came up with was to have a main page that resembled a clock. Each section of the clock would link to an information page on a specific section of the Museum. The clock image was divided into twelve sections, each representing a part of the Museum’s exhibits. Each section would contain a picture and a title.We had two ideas for the clock hands. The first was to have clock hands that would point to whatever section the user’s mouse hovered over. The second was to embed a live clock applet in the middle of the clock image. 

The new user interface for the Museum's online tour.

This week I spent most of my time creating the main clock image and working on the live clock applet code.  I created the clock image in Adobe Photoshop. I had no previous experience with the software so it was a bit of a learning process but I was eventually able to produce a decent image. I then created thirteen variations of the image, saved them as .jpg files, and sent them to one of the other interns. Each of the thirteen variations showed one of the sections of the clock highlighted (the rest faded) and the hour hand of the clock pointing to that section, except one variation that did not show any section highlighted. One of the other interns had created code that would switch between images when the user’s mouse hovered over a certain section. I also generated a piece of HTML code that embedded a live clock applet into the webpage.  The live clock applet was found online and was written in Java. The third intern working on this project developed most of the information pages on specific sections. This was done directly through the NAWCC’s Joomla website system. Next week, we will work on finalizing various portions of this project. 

Shay, St. Mary's College of Maryland

Museum Intern