The Virtual Museum

THIS MATERIAL ©1990–2022 SALLY A. APPLIN AND MICHAEL D. FISCHER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Masters' Thesis: The Virtual Museum, a collaborative project with Apple Computer's 3D Graphics Group under Dr. Frank Crow. Sally's contribution formed her Masters' Thesis at NYU/ITP under the category of Production Thesis. This included design, artwork, UX (non-3D), non-3D graphics content development, and some HyperTalk scripting. Sally won the NYU/ITP Departmental Prize for "Excellence in Design Aesthetics" for this work in 1992.

Paper: The Virtual Museum: Interactive 3D Navigation of a Multimedia Database Gavin Miller1, Eric Hoffert1, Shenchang Eric Chen1, Elizabeth Patterson1, Dean Blackketter1, Steve Rubin1, Sally Ann Applin2, Derrick Yim3, Jim Hanan4

The Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation - Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds Volume 3, Issue 3, pages 183–197, July/September 1992

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/vis.4340030305/abstract

Abstract: "The Virtual Museum is an interactive, electronic museum where users can move from room to room, and select any exhibit in a room for more detailed examination. The exhibits in the museum are educational, encompassing topics such as medicine, plant growth, the environment, and space. To facilitate interaction with the museum, a new method for navigating through a prerendered 3D space, and interacting with objects in that space has been developed, called ‘virtual navigation’. Virtual navigation employs real-time video decompression for the display of, and interaction with, high-quality computer animation. In addition, a representation for 3D objects in animated sequences is used which permits pixel-accurate, frame-accurate object picking, so that a viewer can select any 3D object to trigger movement within the 3D space, to examine an exhibit in animated form, or to play a digital movie or soundtrack. The use of precomputed video permits 3D navigation in a realistic-looking space, without requiring special-purpose graphics hardware."