The VISEUM project, started last September, is now well under way. The project, linking museums in Europe with Vancouver institutions, has two main aspects. The first involves the development of software for displaying and manipulating images, and the second is the establishment of high-speed network links between the project partners.
Software
Two of the European partners have been doing development work in image display and manipulation. The National Gallery of London has been working with very high-resolution colorimetric images. (Colorimetric refers to the ability to display original image colours accurately in print and on computer monitors.) These high resolution images are very large in size and generally cannot be all displayed at once. The software developed at the National Gallery allows for the smooth panning of large images, so one can examine smaller portions of an image in greater detail, scrolling or panning from one part of a large image to another.
The system used by the Louvre in Paris stores images in a variety of sizes, so that one can examine images at different levels of detail. Their system makes use of tiled images. This means that larger images are broken into successively smaller pieces or "tiles". Thus a screen-sized image might be broken down into 4 sections. Clicking on one section might bring up a screen-sized image of just that section (which might be further broken down into more detailed sections).
A goal of the VISEUM project is to produce a viewing system that can make use of these different approaches to viewing images. Within the project ACT's Cinemage system will be modified and expanded to handle these different image formats, and the resulting software will form the basis of the second generation Cinemage system.
Networking
The networking part of the project provides a challenge. It involves
linking a number of different networks so as to provide a seamless connection
between diverse installations on two continents. We'll describe the networking
aspects of the project in a future issue of the newsletter.