Open Exhibits
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.
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
GestureWorks and Open Exhibits – New Releases
Three and a half years ago we first launched GestureWorks, a fledgling multitouch framework for ActionScript. Tomorrow, GestureWorks 3.5 will be released with a series of new features including 75 built-in user interface elements and software modules. These customizable elements and modules are written in the Creative Mark-up Language (CML). We developed CML as a standard for defining object creation, management and interaction.
GestureWorks 3.5 is fully compatible with the Windows 8 operating system, which will be released next week. GestureWorks 3.5 built applications work with Windows 7, Windows 8 or devices that support TUIO touch events. GestureWorks built applications have been developed for touch-tables, wall, kiosks, desktop computers, tables, mobile phones, and even embedded devices. We include a lifetime license of GestureWorks with our multitouch tables and our Presenter Touch Wall.
In addition, tomorrow (October 18) is a big day for our Open Exhibits educational software and community site initiative. The Open Exhibits software framework will be updated to version 2.5. A new Open Exhibits player will be released, making it easier for non-programmers to develop interactive multitouch and multiuser exhibits. Open Exhibits also has software to assist with the development of Arduino and motion-recognition exhibits. Open Exhibits is free to museums, nonprofits, and educational organizations.
In addition, there will be more changes to the Open Exhibits community Website. We are redesigning the front page and we’ve expanded our Getting Started guides and tutorials. Other recent changes include, expanding our Papers section and a new 3-part blog post on creating motion recognition exhibits with Microsoft Kinect.
‘Ghosts in Armour’ at Santa Fe Complex
A new installation at Santa Fe Complex uses one of our multitouch tables along with three projectors to create an interactive and immersive space. The installation, Ghosts in Armour, is described as “a multi-disciplinary artistic exploration into the emerging post-industrial landscapes of Europe’s declining steel industry, documenting and contextualizing the losses currently shaping a number of communities.”
The multitouch table is used to show many of the spaces that Ghosts in Armour has documented. The table uses Open Exhibits software. The exhibit software is based-on a free Open Exhibits template, NSF in Antartica. The video below shows the Ghosts in Armour installation at Santa Fe Complex.
You can learn more about Ghosts in Armour on the SF_X website. The exhibition runs from until June 1st.
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
Events at The Tech and the Maxwell Museum
Last week we conducted a workshop at the British Museum in London and hosted an open house to show off Open Exhibits software and our MT55 Platform multitouch table. Our next two events are at The Tech Museum in San Jose and the Maxwell Museum right here in New Mexico.
Connecting the iPhone to the multitouch table. You can see photos and learn more about the event at British Museum on the Open Exhibits blog.
On November 15th, we’ll be at The Tech Museum in San Jose participating in the Interfaces for the New Decade – Conference and Gallery Opening. You can get tickets for the day long event or you can come by the free evening reception. We will be demoing the Heist software project,which allows visitors to “steal” digital objects from a multitouch table using their mobile devices. We will also have a demo of our Open Exhibits Gigapixel Viewer controlled by a Microsoft Kinect. If you’re in the Bay Area and want to check out our MT55 Platform multitouch table we will have one at the Tech.
A ceramic head from Guatemala, traced to the Postclassic Mayan times (AD 100-1697)
On December 2nd, we’ll be at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology on the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque. We will be running Heist software on the Maxwell’s MT55 Pro multitouch table. The touch table will show digital objects from the “Look Close See Far: A Cultural Portrait of the Maya” exhibit which features objects the Maxwell’s Mayan collection. The event runs from 4 to 6:30 PM. You can learn more on the Maxwell site, look under Events. The Maxwell Museum is one of our museum partners for the Open Exhibits project funded by the National Science Foundation.
Open Source for Museums: Session at the AAM 2011 Conference
Tomorrow, I’m participating in a session entitled, Open Source for Museums: The Experiment Continues at the American Association of Museums (AAM) annual conference. This is a follow up to a session to one I was involved in two years ago. I’m representing the Open Exhibits software initiative. Here’s the description for the session:
Join the project leads of Pachyderm, Omeka, CollectionSpace and Open Exhibits for an introduction to open source and a frank discussion of the promises and potential pitfalls of open source software in the museum world. Learn about the origin and forms of the open source software movement and about the history of its application in the museums.
Hope to see some of you tomorrow! Bright and early, it is a 9AM session.
Free Multitouch Software for Flash and Kinect from Open Exhibits (Video)
cross posted from Open Exhibits Blog
Open Exhibits has just passed 4,000 software downloads! If you’re not a programmer, or you haven’t downloaded the code, yet – we thought we’d give you an idea of what you may be missing.
This video demonstrates several of the free multitouch software modules already posted on the Open Exhibits site. These modules are designed to simplify Flash and ActionScript exhibit development, and many are compatible with the Microsoft Kinect (using MT-Kinect). The source code for every module shown in the video can be downloaded today on the Open Exhibits Software page.
We demonstrated the software on the TRu Touch 21.5″ multitouch monitor from Touch Revolution and 3M M2256PW 22″ display.
Open Exhibits modules require Open Exhibits Core SDK (free for museums, non-profits, and educational use). The software modules can be used commercially with GestureWorks SDK.
We’ll continue to post videos as we release new software. If you have any comments or feedback, we’d love to hear from you.
