Final Paper

In my final project, I designed ONline, an online museum visiting service. By combing web and code, ONline makes it possible for people to have an interactive virtual museum experience.

I’ve always been a big fan of museums. However, when I lived in Illinois most of the museums I wanted to visit were far away from me. For example, even though Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnworth house resides in Illinois, it would take me three hours to drive there. This made me think, what should I do if I want to visit many museums and galleries? It would take days or weeks to see them all if they are far from each other. In my opinion, museums are houses of arts and arts should not be made difficult for people to access. That’s why I started the Online project. My target group is people who live far from museums and people who do not want to go the museums alone.

My inspiration came from our design class. In our design class, we did research of art and technology. I then discovered Teamlab, a group that does lots of projects and artworks that combines art and technology. One of their work called “The infinite crystal Universe” attracts me the most. It brings viewers an immersive experience of the universe through creating an environment similar the the physical universe. In their design concept was “We believe that the digital Domain can Expand art.” This inspired me. I think interactions between people and objects is also a mirror of relationships among people. Using digital technology is not like traditional media. Digital exhibition might give viewer a whole new experience and makes it easier for people to access arts by visiting online museums.

In the bootcamp, I have learned a lot in web and code class. Through building our own portfolio websites, using processing to make text adventure games, learning html, css, js and java, I started to know how to build a website by myself and how to use java. Thus, I decided to build a website that can help people who live far from museums to ‘visit’ the museum online. This website let them find exhibitions and artists that interest them and helps them decided which museum to go to. The museum page has 3D showing rooms of the museum interior and will make visitors feel that they are actually visiting. This 3D showing room is done by JAVA.

In my process of building the website and coding in JAVA. I believe I was successful with making this project comprehensive and the website accessible. I met some challenges in Processing. For example, I wanted visitors to get closer to artworks by using ‘mousePressed’ and show information of artworks. However, it was a little bit hard to realize. For the future iteration, I want add ‘keyPressed’ function so that the 3Dshowing room could be controlled by “mousePressed”.

I appreciate my chance in Bootcamp and I enjoy the time I spent with teachers. I also thoroughly recognized the changes technology brings us. I’m looking forward to a better grip of designing with technology in my upcoming studies.