FOCO

Joana Passi
Ricardo Castañeda Marin

FOCO is a system designed to facilitate the access to extensive and diverse digital
collection of photos. A ReacTable and fiducials are used to create quicker and easier means
of search and interact within the digital archive. The actual system is composed mainly by
three fiducials: index, historial and storage. The index fiducial allows the user to visualize
all the tags or key words that are used to classify every photo in the collection. This visualization
permits multitouch manipulation of the key words to search photos of the user interest. Once a search
is performed the user can visualize and manipulate the results as desired by zooming, translating
or emphasizing to get specific information of the photos like data, local and summary among others.
The history fiducial is used to visualize all the searches performed in a session. The user can go
from one search to another visualizing the results. The storage fiducial is used here to save any
of these photos as desired.

From a general point of view, the main funcionality of FOCO was designed to be used with a large
multitouch table in public places like musseums etc, rather than with a pesornal one,
without beign this exclusive. The system can be easly adapted to work with any other media like
for example music and video collections. To ensure portability,FOCO was programmed in
JAVA/Processing using MySql to administrate the database of the collection to be used.