Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A virtual art museum
Our current testbed on the Web is an art museum. The museum consists of a
set of galleries, each of which contains rooms filled with artworks. There are
presently two galleries: the
Nativity Exhibit
houses medieval and Renaissance
religious art revolving around the birth of Christ, while the
Pre-Raphaelite
Exhibit
features 19th century artworks in the style of that movement.
Within these galleries, annotations provide a visiting agent with details
about their artworks, including their historical contexts, the lives of their
artists, their relationships to other artworks in the gallery, and details about
specific characteristics of the art. Any agent familiar with the artwork ontology
can immediately extract this information for whatever purpose.
The Web agent used in the virtual art museum is a character called Merlyn,
aptly named after the forgetful old wizard of T.H. White's
The Once and Future
King
. Figure 3 shows Merlyn in the Briar Rose Room of the Pre-Raphaelite
gallery, in the process of telling a story to the user.
Merlyn's purpose is to explore the art museum together with a child. To do
this he uses the annotations in several ways. First, he can describe the paintings
he and the child see as they travel through the museum; he can provide in-
formation about when they were made, by whom and how. This information
is available both on demand and through his autonomous lecturing behaviors.
Sinceheretainstheseannotationsashetravels,hewillalsobeabletoreferback
to them if they relate to current topics (“Remember the other picture of Tristan
we saw?”)
He can also use the annotations to play games with the user; one simple
example Merlyn can play is “I Spy,” the children's game in which participants
take turns guessing what object one child is thinking of.
The agent's third major function is storytelling. Merlyn uses his internal
database or the annotations in the museum as his sources. One of the imple-
mented tales in the Pre-Raphaelite gallery, for example, is the story of Sleeping
Beauty, which is told using Edward Burne-Jones' four “Briar Rose” paintings as
illustrations. This is the story Merlyn is reading to the user in Figure 3. He will
autonomously offer to tell stories when he encounters new ones, and the user
can direct him to stop or move forward or backward through the story through
the buttons on the control panel. Merlyn uses the combination of an internal
timer and a sensor that monitors the user's actions and will offer to proceed if
the user appears to be bored or finished with the page.
In the art museum ontology, a story is a kind of
tour
, and consists of a
sequence of artworks on Web pages, each of which has one or more pieces of
