Internet Archaeology 7. Terras. A Virtual Tomb for Kelvingrove: Design Documentation

4. Design Documentation

The tomb model was designed as follows after consultation with the Kelvingrove Museum:

The system will provide a stand-alone virtual reality display of an archaeological reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian tomb of Sen-nedjem for Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. Users will be able to interact with the model to explore the tomb by means of the mouse. The display needs to be easy to use, and secure so the system is not damaged by unauthorised access. The first view of the tomb will provide some context to the model by showing it from the outside. An animated fly-through will take the user inside the tomb, allowing exploration of the inner chamber. Only one user at a time can provide input but many users can watch the display. Interactive and animated elements will be used to increase the sense of reality of the model (see section 8).

Because of the time taken to produce the initial view of the tomb, the model needs to be rendered only once. However, the model should reset to the initial starting viewpoint when there has been no user interaction for a short while. The screen saver utility will be used to present a preliminary information screen. Information regarding the use of the model should be displayed on the screen.

The system should be easy to install and support and should have sufficient documentation.

The model will be made using VRML utilising Netscape, Word 2.0, CosmoPlayer 2.0 and CosmoWorlds 2.0. Image textures used in the model will be from Das Grab des Sennedjem (Shedid 1994).

This textual description was translated into the following technical specification. The Requirements Analysis specifies exactly what is required of the system, the overview of System Components (figure 1) provides a entity relationship diagram which notes how different elements in the system interact, the Data Flow Diagrams (figures 2-5 inclusive) illustrates how information passes around the system and the Entity Life History Diagram (figure 6) illustrates the order in which procedures are carried out.