Medianeum: Crafting Interactive Timelines from Multimedia Content

The MEDIANEUM project consists in an interactive installation allowing an audience to explore a timeline and access informational data such as texts, images and video. Through a Microsoft Kinect depth sensor, users’ skeletons are captured and their gestures are tracked to interact with the data presented on a screen, made using Processing for faster prototyping, This part of the workflow is being reworked as a standalone and configurable utility for user-tracking named Melon. The graphical user interface is built upon ProcesSwing, our version of the Processing IDE embedded into a standard Swing Java GUI widget toolkit application, and the TimelineJS library from Vérité.co/Northwestern University, allowing to create online, personalized and interactive timelines that mash up historical events, sorted in definable categories.