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).

This week the new site for the Informal Science website (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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

 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.