NEWS AND UPDATES FROM IDEUM

New Beta Version of Informal Science is Live

This week the Beta site for the Informal Science website (beta.informalscience.org) was launched. Ideum, in collaboration with CAISE (The Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education) and the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, designed the site and compiled the resources of three previous educational sites into a single, comprehensive online destination for informal science education (ISE) professionals. The site was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Along with a new and improved design, the Informal Science website features an active member community, interactive guides, a robust project and research search engine, discussion forum, in-depth wiki and much more.

Learn more about the Informal Science web project in our portfolio.

 

Ideum at the AAM Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo

Ideum will be attending this month’s American Alliance of Museum’s Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo in Baltimore, May 19-22. We’ll be at Booth #501 - come see our Platform 3M 46 touch table, Presenter 55 touch wall, and our Open Exhibits Collection Viewer application.  

The MuseumExpo opening event begins on Monday, May 20th at noon. 

Jim Spadaccini, Ideum’s CEO & Creative Director, will present in the Annual Meeting session titled Learning Together: Developing Multi-User Interactives on Tuesday, May 21st at 8:45 a.m.  Fellow presenters include Aaron Miller of Bluecadet, Marie Georg of the Field Museum, and moderator Josh Goldblum of Bluecadet. 

Flickr-Based Multitouch & Multiuser Collection Viewer

Our Open Exhibits educational software initiative recently released a new multitouch and multiuser Collection Viewer allowing visitors to browse large museum collections.  The software pulls images and their descriptions directly from “sets” in Flickr, making the collections easy to manage.

The software has customizable “docks” that allow it to be optimized for touch wall or multitouch table displays.  The software is free for educational use. The video below shows how the software works.

The example we developed pulls images from the Women in Science Flickr set posted by the Smithsonian. Open Exhibits is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Spring Equinox & Traditions of the Sun

Yesterday was the first day of spring and it reminded me of a project we did back in 2004-2005. Traditions of the Sun was a NASA-funded project that explored ancient observatories. The project brought us to New Mexico as we explored Chaco Culture National Historical Park. It also took us to the Yucatan where we explored the famous sites of Chichen Itza and Uxmal, along with the lesser-known sites of Mayapan, Kabah, Ek Balam, and Dzibilchaltun.The photograph above was taken at Dzibilchaltun on the spring equinox back in 2005. At sunrise the sun shines directly through the doorway of the temple and rises above the structure. Here’s the description of the photograph from the Traditions of the Sun website.

The House of the Seven Dolls, also known as the Sun Temple, is extremely important to Mayan archaeoastronomers because of its function in charting the sun’s movement. Dzibilchaltun’s urban core is aligned along an east-west running sacbe, or ancient road, which effectively dedicates the city as a marker of the sun’s range and movement, back and forth each solar cycle.

The Sun Temple sits at the far east end of the site, and from this temple, a high priest would chart the sun’s passage, particularly when nearing the time of the equinox. The priest, during this time, would await the sunrise from inside the temple, where he alone was first privy to the birth of the fiery sun, while the masses waited in the plaza below for his announcement. They would not see the sun until it rose above the temple’s door jamb and actually shone through the temple.

We took hundreds of photographs of ancient sites in the Yucatan and Northern New Mexico as part of the project (including some very unique aerial photographs of the Yucatan). These images along with descriptions are available on the Traditions of the Sun website. 

Ideum at Museums and the Web and AAM Annual Conferences

We have a couple of conferences coming up in April and May. We will be showing our prototype 3M 46″ Platform Multitouch Table which debuted at Digital Signage Expo (DSE) in February and then went on to hit South-by-Southwest (SXSW) earlier this month. Come check it out yourself at:

Museums and the Web in Portland, April 17-20.  In addition to an exhibit booth, we will be doing a workshop on Open Exhibits, our free multitouch software for museums and educational institutions.  

|American Alliance of Museums in Baltimore, May 19-22, Come see us at Booth #501 right near the entrance to the exhibit hall. We will demo the latest Open Exhibits software. In addition, Ideum’s Jim Spadaccini will be one of the presenters for a session: Learning Together: Developing Multi-User Interactives. That session will be held, bright and early at 8:45AM on Tuesday May 21st. 

Ideum CTO Paul Lacey Nominated for BizTech Award

Ideum’s own Paul Lacey was nominated for an Albuquerque Business First BizTech Innovation Award. These new awards are “recognizing innovations, executives and collaborations that are breaking new ground in technology.”  All of the nominees will be profiled in an April 26th special print edition of Albuquerque Business First. The awards winners will be announced on April 25th. There is more about the BizTech Awards on the Business First Website. 

3M 46″ ‘Platform’ Multitouch Table Prototype

A new 3M and Ideum multitouch table prototype debuts this week at the Digital Signage Expo (DSE) 2013 in Las Vegas.  DSE is the world’s largest trade show dedicated to interactive display technology. The table uses the 3M 46″ (C4667PW) multitouch display integrated into an Ideum Platform pedestal.

The 46″ 3M Multi-Touch Display, with 3M Projected Capacitive Technology, has been fully integrated within an Ideum Platform multitouch table chassis. The table supports 60 simultaneous touch points at an ultra fast 12ms response rate.  It is fully-integrated and has a single-push button control. The Platform has an  i7 quad-core processor, 16 GB RAM, and an SSD drive. It has full connectivity including built in RFID and it runs Windows 7 or 8 OS.

DSE 2013 attendees are invited to stop by the 3M Touch Systems booth (#926) and check it out. There will also be Gestureworks multitouch software demos running on a variety of 3M hardware including their massive 84″ multitouch screen. Ideum will be on-hand at DSE on Thursday, February 28 and we welcome you to contact us to meet up.

Below are a few photographs of the prototype.

This new Ideum and 3M Platform prototype is as exactingly crafted as all of our multitouch tables: hardened, turn-key, and made for demanding public spaces. The 46″ Platform table will be available this summer, we hope to announce a firm date in the next month.

Gestureworks Core and GestureKey Release

This week we released Gestureworks Core for authoring multitouch and motion recognition applications (using the Leap Motion controller) for C++, C# .NET, Java, and Python. Development of the Core has been ongoing since 2011 – some of the foundational work goes back even farther. Core development has been largely self-funded, although we are very grateful for the support we received from the Los Alamos National Laboratories Venture Acceleration Fund (VAF) in 2012. We are incredibly excited about Core and believe we’ve created the most powerful and fastest authoring platform for multitouch and motion recognition available. 

We’ve also released our first Gestureworks-powered utility called GestureKey. This unique utility for Windows 8 maps gestures to key commands and mouse events, making legacy applications multitouch-enabled. It is incredibly easy-to-use; you can add multitouch to virtually any Windows app in minutes with no programming.

Find more of the Gestureworks story in the About section on the newly redesigned Gestureworks site. Below are videos of Core and GestureKey in action.

You can visit the Gestureworks site or visit the GestureKey or Gestureworks Core pages to learn more.

Multitouch & HCI Workshop at WebWise Conference

 Next month, I will be presenting at the WebWise Conference in Baltimore. Multitouch Collaborative Computing & Other HCI Delights will cover various aspects of multitouch and multiuser exhibit design. In addition, I will demonstrate some of the other emerging HCI technologies such as motion recognition. The workshop is scheduled for Wednesday, March 6th. Here is the description: 

The popularity of multitouch‐enabled phones and tablets has shifted user expectations and changed the way computer installations are designed for public and semi‐public spaces such as: museums, libraries, schools and other places where people gather. More and more, visitors expect that screens found in public spaces are not only touchable, but are also capable of multitouch. This shift has helped expand interest in large‐scale multitouch tables and touch walls and is bringing to the forefront new and collaborative ways for users to interact.

While the rise in touch‐based mobile devices may be the catalyst for interest in large‐scale multitouch, the differences in the types of user interaction are significant. Unlike mobile devices, multitouch tables and touch walls encourage multiple users to interact simultaneously; software can be designed to encourage face‐to‐face collaboration and social interaction. The potential for informal learning around these types of installations is just beginning to be explored.

In this workshop, we will look at the physical and social nature of multitouch tables and touch walls; we will focus on the qualities of collaborative computing as multitouch technology and design models continue to evolve and mature. In addition, we will take a brief look at motion recognition and discuss how this technology and others are collectively forming a new wave in HCI (human computer interaction). A short introduction to the Open Exhibits project will also be presented.

Open Exhibits Workshop at Museums and the Web 2013

Open Exhibits is presenting a workshop at the Museums and the Web 2013 conference in Portland, Oregon on Wednesday, April 17.

The Open Exhibits workshop will explore the technology and design aspects of multitouch, multi-user exhibit development through hands-on application building using the Open Exhibits SDK. Among much else, the workshop will introduce the digital database collection viewer, an application that allows multitouch, mulituser browsing of a museum’s digital media archive.

The workshop is open to both new and veteran users. Workshop attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions and learn about topics of interest including:

• Integrating digital media databases (including Flickr)
• Multitouch, multiuser design strategies
• Gesture Markup Language
• Creative Markup Language
• Building components and other advanced SDK topics

Workshop attendees will experience the Open Exhibits software framework through one of Ideum’s multitouch tables, the Platform.The attendees will learn how to create an application using the framework and will have the opportunity to test it on a large multitouch, multiuser computing surface.

The workshop will be led by Jim Spadaccini, Director of Ideum and Principal Investigator of Open Exhibits and Charles Veasey, Project Manager and Lead Software Developer of Open Exhibits.

The annual Museums and the Web conference is the leading international conference in the field of museums and their websites. It has been organized by Archives & Museum Informatics each Spring in North America since 1997.

Register now:
http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com