At the Nasher we want as many people as possible to experience our exhibitions, which is why we were so excited to start rolling out our virtual exhibitions. I'm Christopher, one of the computer science interns working on bringing our latest exhibition "In Relation to Power" to the web.

In this video I 'm going to give a behind-the-scenes look at the process and tools we use to make the magic happen and clue you in on how you might be able to make something similar at home. I hope you're ready because we're about to make your house into an art installation!

The first step in making a digital exhibition is capturing the exhibit itself; for this we need 360 images. The photos for our website are taken with a special spherical camera by our wonderful photographer J Caldwell.

Fortunately, for us, there is a way that you can take similar photos with your [smart]phone.

Download the app Google Street View. Once it's downloaded, open it up and select the camera icon in the bottom right corner. After clicking "take photosphere." follow the instructions to take 16 images that will eventually represent your final product. Once you're done click the check mark and the 360 image will automatically be saved to your photos, then go ahead and send that over to a laptop where you'll be able to use it with our next tool Marzipano. Marzipano is what does much of the heavy lifting for our site. What you'll do to begin is click the Marzipan Tool in the top right. This will take you to a new tab where, after clicking through the intro, it will ask you to upload your panoramas.   

Go ahead and do that now and wait for them to finish uploading. Now for the fun part...adding info hotspots and link hotspots! There are a few things you can do with info hotspots within your dorm. 
The first is you can add a little bit of detail to certain things within your scene that you think viewers might miss on first glance. I've done this here with this info hotspot which I've entitled "Gift for my Roommate." In the description I've specified that it's a "Dark Souls"  poster. Another thing you can do is use the info spots to label certain posters or artworks you might have in your room. This is similar to the work we do in making our virtual exhibitions for the museum.

For example,  you can put the title of the work in the title section and then list some attributes about the work itself such as the artist, the collection status, the dimensions, the material and a short description about the piece.
When we make our virtual exhibitions in Marzipano we do something slightly different, we put very specific strings for the title and the text for the purpose of automating it to make it faster because we've customized the template a little bit so we do need to do a little work outside of that.

For our purposes here the title and the description in just a human-readable format is perfectly fine.

The next thing we'll need to do, after you've placed all your info hotspots by clicking info hotspot, is dragging it around to place where you want it and clicking the pencils to edit the text. 
The next thing we need to do after that is link hotspots. So what link hotspots do is they allow you to jump between different "rooms," the different panoramas that you've imported

if you have more than one. For example, this link hotspot here is labeled "common _room" and it will let me jump to the other room 
in my dorm by clicking this button up here.

So we can see that brings me to our common space and then to get back we would just create a link hotspot–again drag it wherever you like–you can rotate that where you like the arrow to point with this button here and then, looking at this drop down, we want to select "dorm_room" so it sends us back to the dorm room when  we click the enter button right here. The last thing we have to do is going into the dorm room we see that it's not exactly looking at the place we want it to look so we can just drag to where we wish it to look when we enter the room and click "Set Initial View" so that's not looking at the ceiling when you go to that room. Now, once you've placed all of your info hotspots and link hotspots and set all of the initial views to be what you want them to be, the last thing to do is look on this left panel and make these settings how you want them to be. The title of the whole project goes up here; similarly you can rename the different panoramas which will show up on the left hand side, so make sure you have them as you want the user to see them, and then finally these settings right here you can turn on auto rotate so that your website will sort of do this panning on its own and you can also enable full screen and view control buttons which I would recommend that you do. Once you've done all of this you can go ahead and click export in the top right and this will generate a zip file for you. Go ahead and make a note of where that is on your computer and unzip it as we'll be using it in the next portion of the project.

T he last thing we'll need to view the project is Web Server for Chrome.

Once you get to this site go ahead and click this button here it should say add app and then click through the dialog that says "Allow Chrome to Install the App." Once you do that it should take you to the apps page where you can launch your web server by clicking on this button right here. Once you click that button it will pull up this window, where you have to change one thing before you can finally see the site that you've made. Go ahead
and click "CHOOSE FOLDER" and then navigate to wherever you unzipped the file that Marzipano generated earlier. Once you get there click on "app-files" and then "Select." This should make "Current: /app-files" appear next to "CHOOSE FOLDER."

Once you've done this you can go ahead and click this web server URL right here and it will bring you to the site that you've generated! Now you know everything you need to know in order to create your very own digital exhibition. If you want to share this with others, either show it to them on your computer, take a screen recording and send it to them or, if you're really in for a challenge, look into how to host your site on the internet. There are many free options you can pursue. 

If this has gotten you interested in digital exhibitions in general check out the art collection of digital exhibitions over on our website linked below. Finally don't forget to check out our latest virtual exhibition "In Relation to Power" coming to the site soon this December.