|
|
|
Senior Design Project
My senior design project at MSOE consisted of creating an electronic museum guide system. This system was intended to replicate and expand upon the behavior of similar audio-tour systems that are available at most museums, but use off-the-shelf parts to reduce costs significantly. We were able to use PDAs to reduce the cost of the system by a factor of 10 or so, while at the same time expand upon the standard audio playback feature by allowing the user to watch videos and view images. In addition, the museum was provided with an application that would easily allow the employees to manage the information about the collection and associated media files.
This system is going to be used in the Eckhart G. Grohmann Museum, which is currently being constructed on campus. The Grohman collection consists of about 660 different art pieces focusing on "Man at Work" throughout history. Visitors will check out the PDA, which will be running our software, and use it to listen to an audio tour and watch movies as they browse the museum. The curator will use another application we developed to maintain a database of information that is accessed by the PDA application.
Prototype Visitor Tool Images
The following images are pictures taken of our visitor tool application running on the PDA. The basic function is that the user enters a number associated with an artwork, then is taken to a series of media items associated with the artwork. This includes text, pictures, movies, and audio, all of which are displayed using special Macromedia Flash applications. The application is essentially a C# application displaying a browser control, which displays data from a collection of XML files.
|
|
