Before we look at what is involved in preparing a navigation script, consider the following:
- IMu Tours guides visitors to and from locations, not to and from objects or exhibits. A location may have one object or many (it might be a display case, for instance).
- Visitors are actually adding Narratives to their tour, not objects or exhibits, although these may indeed coincide (again, a Narrative could relate to a group of objects in a display case).
- A Narrative is attached to a location on the Guided Tours tab of the Narratives module. In other words a Narrative record is attached to a Locations record.
Preparing the navigation script involves plotting and scripting the navigation from each room to every adjacent / connected room.
For the sake of illustration only the display rooms in our fictional museum have been numbered:
For Room 1 (Entry Hall) we need to script how to get from:
- Room 1 to Room 2
-AND-
- Room 1 to Room 7
From Room 2, we need to script how to get from:
- Room 2 to Room 1
-AND-
- Room 2 to Room 3
From Room 3, we need to script how to get from:
- Room 3 to Room 4
-AND-
- Room 3 to Room 7
-AND-
- Room 3 to Room 2
And so on. For the National Museum, the necessary pairs of directions are indicated by the blue arrows:
Each direction from one room to an adjacent room is:
- Recorded as an audio file.
- Saved to the Multimedia module.
- Attached to the relevant Locations record.
For instance, the three audio files describing how to get from Room 3 to Rooms 4, 7 and 2 are attached to the Locations record for Room 3.
Within a room, we need to orient the visitor (get them facing in a particular direction) and then guide them to a display location. In this case we do number the display locations. Consider a situation in which a visitor has selected three items in the same room. By numbering the display locations so that locations close to each other are numerically close, IMu Tours can guide the visitor from one selected item in a room to another in a sensible order. For example, we might number display locations in the Special Exhibitions Room as follows:
In this case, if a visitor selected items in locations 18, 9, 15, 8, IMu Tours would guide them through the room in this order: 8>9>15>18.
As we'll see, this number is recorded in the Location Order: (Details for Tour) field for the display location in the Locations module. It is used by IMu Tours to determine the order in which exhibits are viewed if a visitor has chosen more than one exhibit in the same room (or exhibition zone).
The following List View shows all of the display locations within the Special Exhibitions Room, including the Location Order:
A sample script is provided for the fictional National Museum. Once scripted, each direction (from Room 1 to 2, from Room 2 to 1) must be recorded as an audio file and saved in the Multimedia module.