Virtual museum of filmVirtual museum of filmVirtual museum of filmVirtual museum of filmEliška Pätoprstá

Faculty of mathematics physics and informaticsFaculty of mathematics physics and informaticsDepartment of applied informatics

e-mail: elielieliska@gmail.com

Figure 1: The root of the LOD-story tree – one image and one line.

1. IntroductionWe introduce a prototype of a LOD-story presenting program and its subsequent Java implementation for internet presentation. We have created the virtual museum for the movie picture Wild geese alike (Martin Tapák, 2000) with the use of photographs made during the film making by Matej Zeman, in combination with the film script written by Andrej Ferko. The LOD-story input is the time available to a virtual tourist. The output is given by the presentation itself - and its length.

2. Previous WorkThere is a vivid research of digital and interactive storytelling, including European project Inscape or MIT Media Lab Center for Future Storytelling. The easiest way is storytelling with natural language leaving the e-tourist to read or listen to the voice of an avatar. Reading of the stories should be provided in any case, e.g. for handicapped people or small analphabet children. An obvious key observation is that there are multiple versions of any story, varying in length.Three levels of details are used for stories in VirtualHeart of Central Europe. Each valuable memorial is presented in a (very) short story, middle size story (less than one page) and a complete length story. Local highlights in Prague, Graz, Maribor and Bratislava. Especially towers, wells, and rarities are presented on-line at www.vhce.info (optimized for IE in 2003). We consider instead of the triplet of story versions more levels of detail.

Figure 2: The witch doing some magic with a cock. The annotation extends the imagination, describing what happens around the fireplace before and after – and in invisible surrounding, as well. The buttons Speed and Percent allow for control timing. Design by Eliska Patoprsta.

and navigate in a linear story with varying speed. The approach can be used with any movie, but the authoring of meaning simplification pyramid (or story precision) can be a hard task.

Scheme 1: Manual assignment of 6 levels of details for 20 selected scenes and the resulting tree.

5. AcknowledgementsThis work has in part been funded by Slovak Ministry of Education VEGA No. 1/0763/09.

6. Results and DiscussionWe have created a prototype of LOD-stories for a virtual museum. We prepare online publishing and evaluation. The same can be done with any movie, combining selected frames and script clip-outs.

References: [Came07] CAMERON, F. – KENDERDINE, S. eds. 2007. Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage. MIT Press 2007.[PMZ09] Page of Považské múzeum Žilina. 2009. http://www.sccg.sk/~projects/pav-pm3d/pages.php [online] Accessed February 23, 2010.

Scheme 2: LOD-story processing.

3. Our ApproachFor the virtual museum of tinkers’ history [PMZ07], we solve a problem - how to present a movie picture Wild Geese Alike? The primary datasets for the movie included the novel, movie script, 678 color photos scanned in TIFF format, more than 7 gigabytes (7 224 090 402 bytes). The material shot and the TV film (180 minutes) are not available for virtual museum. Manually combining text and image input (.doc and .tiff formats), we created single database items (scenes), as illustrated in Figure 2.

For each scene we identified the level, stored as sceneindex. For example, 20 indexed scenes are stored in 6layers of a tree data structure, as shown in Scheme 1.

Figure 3: LOD-story interface.

4. ImplementationWe opted for a multiplatform solution in JAVA. The workflow is illustrated in Scheme 2. The database queries are communicated by a Java application. An e-tourist perceives the information shown in Figure 2 .

The navigation offers standard functions like Play or Rewind, but in addition to that the user can set the speed and percentage. The meaning of these new parameters is intuitive. The Percent(age) identifies the level in the tree and the Speed the speed of playing. An e-tourist can estimate his or her depth of interest