The objective of this thesis was to finish development on a multimedia presentation UI prototype designed for Raahe Museum. The presentation dealt with local archaeological findings, an Iron Age burial ground discovered in Tervakangas and a medieval coin hoard unearthed in Pattijoki. The main goal was to develop an end-user ready, fully functional and operational UI and software, which were to be put on display at Raahe Museum.

The visual image and design of the prototype were ready, excluding some required changes and enhancements. The program itself still had some bugs and reliability issues. A capacitive sensor board designed and manufactured by VTT was the UI, through which the user could control the flow of the presentation with hand gestures. The software was to be projected onto a projector screen covering the sensor board. The source codes were written with C++, C# and the selected platform was MFC, a .NET Framework-based WinForms.

The problems realized during practical testing ended up changing the end-product dramatically: The sensor board-video projector combination was replaced by a touch screen and the source codes heavily reliant on sensor board usage were abandoned. However, during the planning phase of the new program it was now possible to consider the possible needs of desired additions and improvements — such as animations — before deciding which programming language and platform to use. The coming changes taken into account WPF with XAML and C# were chosen, as WPF brings with it an easy-to-use graphical interface.

In this thesis the set goals of developing a multimedia presentation UI usable by the patrons of Raahe Museum were met. Customizability was to be as easy as possible, which has been pursued by making the personnel of the museum able to change sounds, background images, captions and/or other informational text without actual programming knowledge. The base code itself can be reused or otherwise exploited in other similar projects that the museum may have.