Design of an Interactive Tabletop Device for Humanities Exhibitions

FAIN: HD-51276-11

University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)
Anne Balsamo (Project Director: October 2010 to September 2013)

Funding details:
Original grant (2011) $50,000.00
Supplement (2011) ($6,925.98)
Supplement (2012) $7,500.00

The development of a prototype tabletop device for museums to allow for interactive browsing of large-scale digital collections, using the AIDS Memorial Quilt database as a test-case.

"Quilty Table" is interactive tabletop device designed to enable the body-based and collaborative browsing of an extensive database of digitalized images of panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The project will create a browsing application that can be used with other large image databases that would be appropriately displayed on an interactive tabletop. By tilting the tabletop, users can explore an expansive a collection of the AIDS Memorial Quilt panels along several dimensions. By twisting the Quilty Table users are able to move between levels of visual content ranging from an extreme wide-angle view of the entire "virtually stitched together" quilt, to a mid-range level that allows for visual browsing, to a close-up level that focuses on a single block of the quilt. When a user selects an individual block to focus on in the close-up view, additional information about the panels are revealed in terms of names, dates, and other relevant meta-data.