Art Gallery

Interactive virtual art gallery: zoomable historical timeline with era click-to-zoom and major event markers, branching art-movement flow (curved streams, hover-to-reveal artist lifespans), one 3D hall per artist (dynamic wall layout, chronological wall order, golden influence lamps, canvas placeholders for missing works, influence-linked exits), painting detail with prev/next catalog browsing and fullscreen lightbox, preserved gallery camera on return, and Wikipedia-sourced artist biographies.

Documentation

Document	Purpose
Documentation/basics.md	Architecture, layout, user flow
Documentation/setup.md	Install, env, npm scripts
Documentation/DB_structure.md	PostgreSQL tables
Documentation/API.md	REST endpoints
Documentation/data-and-images.md	Catalog, bios, seeding, image pipeline

Stack

• Backend: Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL
• Frontend: React, Vite, Three.js (@react-three/fiber, @react-three/drei)

Setup

1. Copy .env.example to .env and set database credentials.

2. Install dependencies:

   npm install
   cd client && npm install && cd ..
   

3. Apply database schema (requires PostgreSQL superuser for first-time setup):

   npm run migrate
   npm run seed
   

4. Enrich the catalog (recommended after seed):

   npm run fetch-artist-bios    # Wikipedia biographies for all artists
   npm run expand-catalog       # add famous works for artists with thin catalogs
   npm run update-influences    # art-history lineage links between paintings
   npm run fetch-images -- --limit=50         # random batch of missing images (10s per work)
   npm run fetch-images -- --artist="Claude Monet"   # one artist in catalog order
   

5. Build the client and start the server:

   cd client && npm run build && cd ..
   npm run server
   

   Open http://localhost:3001

Development

Run API and Vite dev server separately:

npm run dev:server   # http://localhost:3001
npm run dev:client   # http://localhost:5173 (proxies /api and /images)