The scroll, painted in ink and light colors on silk, depicts the Qingming Festival on the river. It offers a spectacularly rich view of aspects of twelfth-century Chinese life, including commerce, dress, and architecture. The painting begins in the countryside, progressing through the suburbs and port on the Bian river, finally ending inside the city walls. The 770 figures come from all classes of Chinese society (though there is only one beggar, and most women are properly concealed in their sedan chairs). At least a dozen forms of transportation are represented, ranging from donkey to rickshaw to wooden ships with sophisticated tiller mechanisms. Nearly everything about the scroll--its title, subject, season, and even the place represented--has been controversial, inspiring debates among scholars of Chinese art history.

The handscroll is about 12 inches high and more than 30 feet long, meant to be held in both hands and read from right to left. Students could study the scroll using slides or books, but neither of these adequately reproduce the handscroll format. In addition, the scroll's enormous depth of detail makes it very difficult to see it all clearly. Finally, though Reed's copy is a reproduction, it is still quite valuable and should not be handled too much.

Tsao's proposed solution was to make a CD-ROM from the scroll. Fresh off their victory with the Reed virtual tour, Mark Chen '95 and I immediately responded with a more specific proposal: QuickTime VR, which had worked well forthe tour. QuickTime VR lets you take pictures of the real world and convert them into interactive, navigable scenes on a computer. It was originally designed for real-life, three-dimensional spaces, but it also works well for navigating two-dimensional images such as works of art.

A student working in the art slide room took the first step in re-creating the scroll: shooting the 98 photographs required for the entire length of the scroll. Once the photos were digitized and converted to QuickTime VR, Tsao identified more than 100 important details that the viewer would be able to examine with just a click of the mouse. Chen and I used Photoshop to zoom in and crop both the photographs of the reproduction and some photographs of the original scroll. Because the original scroll is quite yellowed with age and the photographs were taken under poor lighting conditions these images required a good deal of color retouching in Photoshop.

The final scroll CD-ROM was used with a computer projection system for classroom presentations. It was also loaded onto computers in the IRCs for general access so that students could study the scroll at their leisure outside of class. Because of the zooming capability available with digital images, it is possible to see details on the computer version that are not clearly visible on the hand scroll. As a result, the interactive scroll lets students explore aspects of Chinese art and cultural history with much greater depth than would be possible working from the physical scroll itself.