Art museum tour description

Art Museum Tour

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC offers an online tour of a collection of works by Vincent Van Gogh formerly on loan from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. A significant but concise selection that includes "The Potato Eaters," the exhibit also includes biographical and contextual information about the artist's life and his approach to painting. Young children will find the tour to be a compelling introduction to one of the most fascinating and famous artists of the 20th century. Viewers already familiar with the Dutch artist will undoubtedly discover new and useful facts about Van Gogh and his art. The online tour enables those who cannot make it in person to enjoy the entire special collection. Moreover, the tour is well-designed, easy to navigate, and supports both QuickTime VR and standard browser interfaces.

Not many features distinguish the QuickTime from the standard browser versions of the tour. Launching the tour either way creates a unique interface in which the browser page is divided into two equal halves. The left frame displays a hypertext list of all the individual rooms in the Van Gogh exhibit, such as "Arles," and "Japanese Influence." Below the small list of gallery rooms is a brief bit of text about the paintings on display in that room, with substantial contextual information about Van Gogh's life during the time in which he produced those particular works. A button offering the option to use an accompanying audio guide accompanies every text, making the virtual gallery accessible to the visually impaired.

In the right frame, the virtual tour includes two main elements: a visual image of the National Gallery space with the Van Gogh paintings displayed on the walls; and a floor plan map with which to navigate through the exhibit. QuickTime enhances both of these elements. The floor plan is well-constructed and displays directional arrows signaling to the viewer which way he or she faces in that room. Using the QuickTime tour, the visitor can click and pan through each room to create the sensation of actually being in the gallery. An option to display "hot spots" highlights select paintings on the wall.

Viewers can also easily zoom in and out to focus on objects contained in that room, and the QuickTime interface also allows virtual visitors to enter an adjoining room visually. Thus, the QuickTime version may be more useful for working with elementary-age children because of the more fun, game-like atmosphere the virtual tour creates. Older children and adults, however, would enjoy the QuickTime and standard versions of the tour equally. In both the QuickTime and the standard interface, clicking on one of the hypertext items or on the floor plan map allows visitors to move from room to room. Virtual visitors using on the standard interface can pan the camera in each room, too, using the arrows below the image. Except for the heightened, point-and-click ability to pan, zoom, and view "hot spots" on the photographic image itself, the two versions are identical. In both versions, visitors can click directly on the paintings they see on the walls in the virtual gallery to learn more about that specific piece and to be able to view a close-up image of that particular painting.