The Louvre Museum

Review by Al Giovetti
Price: $40
Released: September 23, 1996
Publisher: Voyager
Phone: 800-446-2001
Web site: www.voyagerco.com
Systems: Macintosh and Windows
Requirements: Windows: 486DX2, 66 MHz, 640x480 pixels, 256-color display; 8 MB RAM; 2X CD-ROM drive; 16-bit sound card with external speakers or headphones; Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, or Windows 95; MS-DOS 5.0 or later. Macintosh: Any color-capable Macintosh (25 MHz 68030; 640x80, 256-color display; at least 8 MB RAM installed (4,500K free); double-speed CD-ROM drive; external speakers or headphones; System 7 or higher louvrescreen01.jpg - 45.2 K

Summary: A Children's CD-ROM Tour through Art and Time

History: Based in New York, Voyager is a publisher of high-quality interactive media, with over three hundred titles in its catalog. Voyager cultivates and maintains close relationships with authors, artists, filmmakers, and educators who want to express their ideas using electronic media, and collaborates on the development of new technologies, most recently the World Wide Web. Recent CD-ROM titles include Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel, Art Spiegelman's The Complete MAUS, Rick Prelinger's "Our Secret Century" series, Morton Subotnick's Making Music and With Open Eyes: Images from The Art Institute of Chicago.

What is it about?: The Louvre Museum is the first volume of its new CD-ROM series "Museums of the World for Kids." Following the critical and popular success of Voyager's With Open Eyes: Images from the Art Institute of Chicago, The Louvre Museum introduces children of all ages to the thrill of looking at brilliant works of Western art. A coproduction of Voyager and French publisher Gallimard Jeunesse.

The Louvre Museum presents over 150 artworks chosen-with children's eyes and imaginations in mind-from a collection that spans over eight thousand years, from Mesopotamian writing tablets through the great French painters of the nineteenth century. A children's art browser of the museum's best known works, The Louvre Museum is designed to encourage children to navigate and explore art pieces at their own speed and in their own way. Full-screen images of art works are accompanied by audio clips that teach, entertain, and challenge a child to probe further. Children can easily see when and where a piece originated and view it in a virtual gallery for an instant sense of scale. Multiple close-ups zoom in on details like the tiny animals hiding in a Flemish tapestry or the ornate inlay on an eighteenth-century armoire, while clever games challenge a child's keen eye.

The Louvre Museum ignites the imagination of children and brings them closer to the wonderful objects and paintings in the world's largest art museum. Children can:
* Take a filmed tour of the entire museum in three minutes
* Select alternate views of each work and zoom in on details such as a piece of the Parthenon or the Mona Lisa's smile
* Visit a virtual gallery that demonstrates the scale and size of each artwork
* Play ingenious games that test powers of observation by transforming the Louvre's treasures into familiar and fun activities like connect-the-dots, what's wrong with this picture, find the detail, and jigsaw puzzles
* Travel along the timeline and map to learn about each work's origin
* Create a scrapbook of favorite masterpieces
* Search for particular artists or artworks using an extensive index