The Viseum project

Viseum is an 18 month project (from Sept 1996) to develop advanced Internet applications for museums. In particular a high speed network (ATM) will be established between Vancouver, Berlin, Paris and London. This allows fast interactivity with high resolution, accurate colour images of art. Techniques will also be developed to allow a central index to be searched for data from various sites. Authorisation methods will be implemented for access control, to allow valuable data to be available to subscribers. A CD-ROM jukebox will be implemented at the test sites to allow the servers to maintain large images online.

Technical outline

The Viseum system will be integrated into the WWW. Conventional internet access to art images can only provide low resolution images due to bandwidth limitations. Current browsers can not show accurate colour images and most images available at the moment are non-callibrated RGB images. High quality data compression techniques will allow data to be transmitted to clients efficiently.

Participants

DeTeBerkom GmbH - Berlin - (Prime)

The University of Southampton - UK
Birkbeck College, University of London - UK
Laboratoire des reserches de France (LRMF) - F
The National Gallery, London - UK
NSM Jukebox - D
Canadian participants:
Advanced Cultural Technologies Inc (ACT)
Newbridge Networks Corp
TeleGlobe Canada Inc
CANARIE Inc
Research Networking Association of British Columbia
The British Columbia Virtual Museum Association

Funded by the European Community's ACTS programme
ACTS page on Viseum
ACTS Chain GAC: Museums/Cultural Heritage
News!

A Java client prototype is now being developed for image viewing.

ATM equipment is installed in The National Gallery

Pyramidal tiled TIFF image format now implemented - excellent for zooming in/out!.

Oracle installed in Birkbeck for their image server

Fibre now available all the way from Vancouver to London (Birkbeck College) and is being linked via UCL to The National Gallery at 10Mbit/s)

The LRMF has filled a CD Jukebox! (150 CDROMS)

ATM network bandwidth allocated across Europe

C image viewer client prototype shows huge speed-up over Java

National Gallery 10 Mbit/s link now installed!