VIKUS: Past Visions

cultural , d3-js , pixi-js , vizualisation , zoomable-interface
This project is part of the research project »Visualizing Cultural Collections« (Visualisierung kultureller Sammlungen) short VIKUS and investigates graphical user interfaces and the potentials inherent to visual exploration of digitized cultural collections.

This project is part of the research project »Visualizing Cultural Collections« (Visualisierung kultureller Sammlungen) short VIKUS and investigates graphical user interfaces and the potentials inherent to visual exploration of digitized cultural collections.

Frederick William IV of Prussia (1795 – 1861) left a collection of drawings behind. They bear witness to historical events such as wars and revolutions, literary influences or personal obsessions with the devil. Numerous sheets reveal the planning eye of the King in the form of architectural visions and dreamy drafts. So far, 1492 sheets of drawings penned by the King have been fully accessed.

PAST VISIONS

Bringing a ZUI to the browser, handling 1500 images in HiRes, having a fluid interaction flow @60fps, staying consistent in look & feel and having a semantic timeline gave me quite a headache. Most of the interface elements, concepts & techniques you see are the the peak of countless iterations. Saying that, there a lot more features which are not included yet. But in general this project represents an other experiment on pushing the perception of what the web and information access in general can look like. You can have a look at some screenshots to grasp a bit of the process and how this prototype formed itself.

Together with and for Urban Complexity Lab (Marian Dörk & Katrin Glinka). Dedicated to Jef Raskin - father of all Zooming User Interfaces

Paper: Katrin Glinka, Christopher Pietsch, Carsten Dilba, and Marian Dörk. Linking Structure, Texture and Context in a Visualization of Historical Drawings by Frederick William IV (1795-1861). International Journal for Digital Art History, No 2, 2016.