In the cooperative project "Berliner Skulpturennetzwerk", the extensive inventories of Pergamenian sculptures held by the Museums of Berlin and the department of classical archaeology of the Free University Berlin will be systematically compiled. Additionally, the department of visualization at the Technical University Cottbus in cooperation the the DAI department in Instanbul develops a 3d reconstruction of the ancient city of Pergamon. ZIB develops a software that allows the public to approach these reconstructed contexts and uses the multitouch capabilities of the iPad to enable the comprehension of interconnections between artifacts and their assumed archaeological contexts. The results of this project are on display to the public in a special exhibition at the Pergamon Museum until the fall of 2012.

We conceptualized and implemented iCon.text as an interactive, multi-touch enabled application for use on iPad kiosks in museum exhibitions. The application enables a wide range of the expected population, including children, digital natives, adults without prior tablet knowledge, and elderly people, to approach information about the artifacts on display. The user interface utilizes both modern multi-touch gesture input as well as more traditional touch screen controls. This way we aim to make the exhibits accessible in different spatial contexts to let users make connections between them and to convey their reception history, i.e. the archaeological research work that led to the reconstruction of the historical contexts. The application lets visitors explore selected exhibits multimodally as virtual postcards (as the central metaphor) from several perspectives: accessing the exhibits from different postcard arrangements, locating them in computer generated renderings of the reconstructed architectural context of Pergamon, recalling them from the exhibition floor plan, or locating them in a panorama painting that presents an artistic view of the past. The object descriptions combine present day photographs of objects and find spots, textual descriptions, historic sketches and photographs, computer generated renderings, as well as links to other objects.
The effectiveness of the user interface will be evaluated with usage logging and visitor surveys during the course of the exhibition.
More information about the Pergamon special exhibition can be found here.

A generic version that can be customized to present artefacts from other exhibitions is available on iTunes.