With the development of our first interactive exhibits, and a few rounds of informal user testing, we’ve begun to explore approaches in multitouch and multiuser design. We’ve created both a multitouch…
Earlier this week, we installed our first multitouch table at the Don Harrington Discovery Center in Amarillo, Texas. The touch table is right in the entranceway to the museum near a large satellite photograph of Amarillo and its’ environs. The table runs a custom mulituser, multitouch application we developed with the Don Harrington Discovery Center and Vulcan Park and Museum. This multitouch mashup application uses Flickr and Yahoo! Maps. There is more on the design and software development process on the…
The Museum Blogs directory site has been revised and relaunched. We have also added a companion site, Museum Podcasts (www.museumpodcasts.org). Both of these directory and aggregator sites are powered by our own RSS Mixer technology. The posts, episodes and information about each contributing blog or podcast come directly from their respective RSS feeds. The directories are updated about every hour. Museum Blogs and Museum Podcasts have integrated widgets for viewing all posts and episodes in the directory. In…
In January I will be teaching an online course for the Technology-Enhanced Communication for Cultural Heritage (TEC-CH) program. This online program is put together by the Università della Svizzera italiana in Switzerland. I’ve been teaching an in-person version of Museums and the Social Web for the last two years in Lugano, Switzerland each fall. In my course we’ll be spending time within the online teaching environment and taking “field trips” to some of the social networking sites that museums are beginning…
This article appears in the most recent print issue of the National Association for Museum Exhibition’s Journal Vol.27 no. 2. Open source software designed specifically for use by…
Back in the spring of 2006 we launched MuseumBlogs.org, a directory and blog-feed aggregator. The site was essentially a WordPress “hack” and over time its’ performance began to suffer as the number of blogs and feeds grew exponentially. Lately the site has been struggling under the weight of 300+ blogs and nearly a quarter million posts. Since our release of RSS Mixer in September we’ve been looking to replace the old Museum Blogs system with a more scalable aggregator. Since a mix of feeds…
This week we completed building our first multi-touch table prototype. With customized software, a 50″ diagonal surface, and a resolution of 1280 x 720 the table is designed to accommodate multiple simultaneous users. The table is comprised of a short throw projector, infrared LEDs, two infrared cameras, and projection screen which adheres to the tempered glass top. The framing material is extruded aluminum. We sourced the materials from all of the world; Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Canada, Japan, and the US. The base software…
Twitter continues to rise in popularity and dozens of museums now use this micro-blogging service. While we have yet to employ Twitter with one of our museum clients, there are a diverse group of museums large and small already using Twitter. Just search for “museum” on Twitter and you’ll find a number of examples (such as the Discovery Center from Springfield Missouri below). It seems likely many more museums will follow in the coming months. Though we’ve just begun to build our own…
An article that I wrote for the July/August issue of the Association of Science-Technology Center’s Dimensions magazine is now available online. Appropriately for these economic times, the issue focuses on ways in which science centers can save money and do more with less. The article, Nine Free or Nearly Free Ways Museums Can Take Advantage of Web 2.0 covers a variety of Web-based services and touches on some of the open source initiatives that are now available to museums. I also list a number…
