Digital Athens: an Application of ArchiTOUR, a Multimedia Authoring System

This paper presents an educational software package for teaching and learning architectural history and theory. The package called Digital Athens is intended to teach architecture in Ancient Athens. It has been developed with the ArchiTOUR multimedia authoring system for architectural education, especially architectural history and theory. It proposes an efficient way to handle and present the diverse multimedia data that architectural education requires. The first section of this paper describes the ArchiTOUR multimedia authoring system. ArchiTOURis main features include 1) three different working modes, 2) ArchiTOUR objects, 3) linking ArchiTOUR objects, and 4) ArchiTOUR hotspots. The next part presents Digital Athens as an application of ArchiTOUR. This segment demonstrates the main ideas involved in the package and the authoring system by illustrating the contents of Digital Athens. Finally, the last part discusses future extensions of ArchiTOUR as well as the Digital Athens package itself