The presenter will race through the city telling you about things to do, things to see, where to stay and more.
You can select the type of information that interests you, and things you would consider boring will be skipped. This can make the tour take (significantly, if you find most things boring) shorter than 5 minutes.
But, for each subject mentioned you can also opt to visit related websites or search for more information. This can make the tour take a lot longer than 5 minutes!
First, you should install the Ambulant plugin, see the downloads page. Currently, this will only work for Safari on a Mac, running MacOSX 10.5.
Select a city on the left to start your tour. We strongly suggest you select Amsterdam.
Seriously, though...
These pages show how SMIL State can be used to enable interaction within multiple components within a webpage. SMIL State is a new module within SMIL 3.0, which enables variables to be used in a SMIL presentation, and sharing these variables with other elements in your web application. In the case of this website, the other elements that share the state are an XForms form and a Google Map widget.
We have presented a paper on this subject, Enabling Adaptive Time-based Web Applications with SMIL State, at ACM Document Engineering 2008 (Sao Paulo, Brazil). It is available through the ACM Digital Library. We also have an authors’ copy available for your personal enjoyment. A journal article which extends this paper is forthcoming and will be listed here when published.
About this work
This demonstration was implemented using the Ambulant Player, an open source SMIL playback engine that is easy to adapt and extend. Ambulant Player has been designed specifically to enable experiments like this one.
The work on this demonstrator, the paper and Ambulant is done by the SEN5 group of CWI, the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.