Cork Street Open Exhibition is supporting Children of Peace charity this year and we thought it would be a good idea to sponsor it with our services. We cannot claim to be totally magnanimous because we just so happened to need a real gallery to trial our new ivGallery (interactive virtual gallery) service and web application. We made contact with the curator, Kathryn Roberts, and made the offer to do a virtual tour and some stills FOC. She was delighted with the prospect and I duely turned up the day before the opening and took all the necessary shots.

The virtual tour photography editing and stitching is always time-consuming, however, it was the finishing of the database design and data loading, completing and testing the web software, and last-minute changes to the user-interface - that kept us up until the early hours for the following few days.

Its' all done now: the virtual tour is up and running with no outages thus far (touch wood!), and the Cork Street Open Exhibition website has a link to the ivGallery on our servers. The web application collects detailed reports of all the artwork viewers click on (to see the artwork resumé), and the number and times of viewings.

It has been extremely satisfying to see the project come to such a successful conclusion after this long build up. We hope it adds a significant and memorable dimension to the exhibition and that through artists contributions for our enhanced service and additional sales of art work - that significantly more money is raised for Children of Peace charity.

Michael Autumn
August 2009