Thursday, August 9

Getting serious about gaming -
The game, which draws obvious inspiration from "The X-Files" and the 1997 thriller "The Game," guides players through an interactive mystery based on actual conspiracy theories involving alien contacts and government cover-ups.
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Friday, August 3

HistoryWired: A few of our favorite things
The interface for HistoryWired was developed by Martin Wattenberg at SmartMoney, Inc., and is based on SmartMoney's Map of the Market. Martin's extensive revisions to make the map relevant to museum objects include a timeline, key words and pointer lines, thumbnails, and a search. The visualization used in the Map of the Market derives from work on treemap displays conducted by Prof. Ben Shneiderman and students at the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab.
The map helps visitors find objects that interest them. It does not reflect the arrangement of objects in storage collections or the physical museum layout. The map face has ten categories that represent different types of objects in the collections. Each "square" on the map face represents an object, and the relative size of the square reflects the ratings given to objects by previous visitors to the site.
The map can be customized using timeline sliders, theme buttons, the text search, or any combination of the features. These features highlight certain objects but do not eliminate any from the map, making all objects accessible at all timesÖ
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