Design
Human Computer Interaction in Informal Science Education Conference
Next week Ideum along with Independent Exhibitions will host the Human Computer Interaction in Informal Science Education (HCI+ISE) Conference. This first-of-its-kind conference will bring together exhibit designers, developers, researchers, and educators to explore the potential of new HCI technologies in informal educational settings. The conference will have events at Explora!, the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Ideum, and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.
The goals of the conference, as stated in our National Science Foundation proposal, are as follows:
“The goals of the meeting are to advance the current state of knowledge about the complex challenges and opportunities that exhibit designers and developers encounter in technology-based exhibitions and suggest strategies for enabling them to share theoretical and implementation approaches and methods.”
This is what we hope to achieve at the conference, again from the original proposal:
The HCI+ISE conference will:
1. Examine existing exhibits that use HCI technology;
2. Bring people together with diverse expertise to explore issues in common, and engage in design activities to better identify effective practices for designing HCI science exhibits;
3. Identify conditions under which HCI can be effective for enhancing museum visitor access, participation, and learning;
4. Identify strategies and mechanisms for expanding the application of HCI to exhibit practice, thereby maintaining freshness and nimbleness in exhibition development;
5. Connect to NSF research priorities, and to initiatives and strategic areas, in order to advance and strengthen the interchanges between museum practice, the learning sciences, and public understanding of science; and
6. Create a network of HCI+ISE users, and take steps to improve communication, knowledge access and leadership within and across ISE communities.
More concretely, we have set up a number of small group activities and discussions that will explore the nature of new HCI technologies and their real and potential applications in museums settings.
The conference will culminate in an exploration of future scenarios. In particular, we are having groups look at the visitor experience seven years from now in 2020. We are focusing on a diverse set of institutions, each with a stakeholder as a group facilitator. Groups will create vignettes of visitor interaction at the following institutions: Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, Explora!, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, SFMOMA, Shedd Aquarium, and London Science Museum.
A digital booklet with findings from the HCI+ISE conference will be released later this summer and will include the future vignettes from each group. In addition, we will have a way for conference attendees and others interested in the future scenario to get these documents (re)emailed to them in June of 2020. This digital time capsule feature will be available on the HCI+ISE site following the conference.
The HCI+ISE Conference is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF DRL #1139752) and sponsored by Intel. (This article is cross-posted on the Open Exhibits & HCI+ISE site).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Human Computer Interaction in Informal Science Education: Conference
June 11-14, 2013 / Albuquerque, New Mexico
The HCI+ISE Conference, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), will bring together museum exhibit designers and developers, learning researchers, and technology industry professionals to explore the potential impact of new human-computer interaction (HCI) technologies in informal science education (ISE) settings. The theme of the Conference is the balance between exhibit technology and the visitor experience.
The emergence of multitouch, motion-recognition, radio frequency identification (RFID), near field communication (NFC), voice recognition, augmented reality, and other technologies are already beginning to shape the visitor experience. In this three-day conference, presenters and participants will share effective practices and explore both the enormous potential, and possible pitfalls, that HCI advancements present for exhibit development.
The Conference will have activities, discussions, and group interactions exploring technical, design, and educational topics centered on HCI+ISE. A variety of technology examples such as multitouch tables, touch walls, Arduino controllers, Kinect hacks, RFID tags, and other prototypes and gear will be demonstrated.
HCI+ISE will focus on the practical considerations of implementing new HCI technologies in educational settings with an eye on the future. Along with a survey of how HCI is shaping the museum world, participants will be challenged to envision the museum experience a decade into future.
Conference events will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, and at Ideum’s Corrales studio.
Attendance at the HCI+ISE Conference is limited to 60 participants, some of whom will be invited because of their specific point of view and expertise. Conference participant interactions will provide opportunities for collaboration and potential partnerships that will persist well into the future. Applications are welcome from exhibit developers, designers, educators, researchers, evaluators, and technologists. Funding from the NSF is available to help support the travel costs of attendees.
The application form and more information about the Conference can be found on this website at: http://www.openexhibits.org/research/hci-ise
Conference co-chairs: Kathleen McLean of Independent Exhibitions and Jim Spadaccini of Ideum, Inc.
The HCI+ISE Conference is hosted by Ideum and Independent Exhibitions and is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1139752.
New Platform and Pro featured in Engadget and Gizmag
The tech blog Engadget, which Technorati lists as the #5 blog in the world, covered the release of our new Platform and Pro multitouch tables last Thursday. The article focused on speed of the two tables and on the new thin design (“half as thick as a SUR40″). You can check out the article, Ideum unveils speedy Platform and Pro multi-touch tables, says PixelSense ain’t got nothin’
On Monday, Gizmag reviewed our new multitouch tables covering all of the new features including our new RFID capabilities. You can read, Ideum sets 4th generation multitouch table on the Gizmag site.
The New Mexico Business Weekly also covered the new release see: Ideum takes next step in touch screen technology. Finally, the new Pro and Platform release was also featured in articles on Slashgear, the French tech blog Journal du Geek, and about a dozen other blogs and sites around world.
Welcome to Ideum Labs
If you’ve read Ideum Blog and you’ve been keeping up with GestureWorks and Open Exhibits, you know that we’re fast moving and productive group. The unfortunate thing about being this productive is that we often don’t get the chance to share all the cool ideas, experiments, and discoveries we’ve made along the way.
Enter Ideum Labs, our new Tumblr blog. Labs was conceived as a high output, low production value home for Ideum and GestureWorks Staff to share raw ideas, UX experiments, project snippets, random acts of science, and interesting HCI + multitouch news.
What have we shared thus far? How about wood-paneled multitouch tables, unpainted touch walls, multitouch solitaire (a la Windows XP), Windows 8 beta, and multitouch Van Gogh.
Learn more about Ideum Labs at Multitouch-Labs.tumblr.com, or read all the Labs posts on the Ideum facebook page.
Collection Viewer 2.0 and Other Open Exhibits Updates
The Open Exhibits project is gearing up for a major update. Open Exhibits is a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored project designed to transform how museum professional and other educators develop interactive computer-based exhibits. Ideum in the principal organization in the project.
A new Open Exhibits multitouch SDK (Version 2) and other new software modules are going to be available in March. We are also re-designing and re-launching the Open Exhibits community-based website. All of this development is based on what we’ve learned from our members in the first 16 months of the project. You can read more about the new release and the new website on the Open Exhibits blog.
We’ve also posted a video showing the new Collection Viewer 2.0. This application has multiscreen support and it comes with editing GUI for adding content. (I should mention too that this multiscreen demo is running on our standard MT55 Platform multitouch table with an external monitor connected via HDMI.)
We still have a long list of additions to add to the Collection Viewer during the course of 2012. If you want see some of the features we are looking to add, see the blog post: Building a Better Collection Viewer (Part 2).
You can see the original post on the Open Exhibits website: Collection Viewer 2.0
