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Posted on | February 28, 2010 | 1 Comment
Overview
This is an informal review of the “How It Is” iPhone app by Tate Modern. At the bottom, you will find a quick reference list of features and pros and cons, and also a series of useful links to relevant online sites, other reviews, etc. As it is an informal review, you may find facts or references that need improvement. Please don’t hesitate to contact the author if so.
Introduction
As a designer fascinated with the potential of integrating web, mobile and exhibit experiences, I have been testing a lot of apps lately. I downloaded Tate Modern’s first iPHone/iPod app, “How It Is,” as soon as I heard about it. I was standing in my kitchen at the time (this becomes important later, trust me). I started it up, tried it out for a minute … and deleted it.
And that’s when it got interesting.
Creepy and Irresistible
“How It Is” is a huge, ominous, dark, immersive installation by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka, a “giant grey steel structure with a vast dark chamber,” currently on view in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Museum visitors can “walk underneath it, listening to the echoing sound of footsteps on steel, or enter via a ramp into a pitch black interior, creating a sense of unease.” Online exhibit reviews use words like “creepy” and “irresistible,” sometimes in the same sentence.
The project has several web and mobile components: a web page for the exhibit, a second website that is an online “exploration” of the project, and an iPhone/iPod app, Tate Modern’s first. Both the “exploration” website and the app are done as full-screen, first-person immersion activities. Both were designed by Champagne Valentine. (The web version uses Papervision technology, a interesting tool for animating 3D Flash experiences.)
(I should, by the way, admit that I have only experienced the online parts. This unfortunately means I can’t actually review the whole app. Part of it, a game, is triggered only upon approaching the museum. Feel free to add to this if you’ve actually visited in person and unlocked the hidden feature.)
What’s an App?
Back to my kitchen. I didn’t know any of that background yet when I hit that INSTALL button in the mobile App Store. I had seen someone mention the app briefly, and went and got it. I was expecting an “app” to test: you know, a colorful, user-friendly, zero-learning-curve bit of software that’s useful and/or entertaining for a little while. A nice augmented audio tour with good voiceover talent, perhaps, like many other mobile museum apps. But what I got, I thought, seemed deliberately unfriendly, impossible to use, had no apparent purpose and made me feel vaguely jumpy. Where was the white background, stacked list navigation, and predictable wipe transitions that go “shhhick”?
The problem wasn’t the app. It was me. After I deleted it, I had second thoughts, a guilty feeling I had missed something standing there in my kitchen. Online, I looked around on the “How It Is” iTunes preview page. A past user had left a comment that this is an “experience” unlike other apps, that it’s much better in darkness. Oh, and that you need headphones. That’s demanding, I thought, but also intriguing. I reloaded it, started it up, plugged in a pair of sound-reducing earbuds, and headed for the basement, where it’s darker and quieter to begin with.
In the Basement
Once I made it to the basement, kept the lights low, and put in my headphones, things got much better. The on-screen graphics became much easier to see, though they still stayed very dark (“black and white” would be a flattering description, this app is just “black”, but in a good way). The sound is also very important, and the special feature in the sound won’t work with the little speakers in the iPhone, no matter how you turn them up (more on that below). In the basement, I realized that this is one of the more interesting apps out there.
This app is a widescreen, first-person immersive program, like the popular Brothers In Arms action games for iPhone, or Call of Duty, or the classic Doom. These are all fighting games, with peril around every corner; I can understand why Tate chose this genre for this app.
It doesn’t deviate from the widescreen orientation, and all action happens in the screen. Your view is a view inside the exhibit space, and you move through the space in the first person to trigger sounds, short video clips, and encounter mysterious floating text and strange objects. The app version is less media-rich than the “exploration” website, but the two are very much cut from the same cloth. The app is the mini version of the web piece, more or less, which I think is a very interesting way to approach a museum mobile project.
It’s very dark, and bleak, and not what you expect. It’s not clear what you’re supposed to do, for one thing, and if you are looking for immediate clarity, you’ll not only be confused, you might even delete it. (Though I can’t imagine who would who do such a thing.) But these aren’t bad characteristics in this case. These characteristics are simply the same as the immersive art work itself, sitting there in the Tate’s Turbine Hall. And in that sense, this app is great.
This Tour is the Art
Frankly, the first time around, I expected a tour, something akin to Yours, Vincent, Love Art, iAfrica, or the Dinosaurs app from AMNH, all of which are sitting on my iPhone right now after a binge of testing (see reviews by others on this wiki). These are all basically either audio tours with visuals added in (first two) or slide shows with a few extras (last two). The “How It Is” app is something completely different. This app, I believe, isn’t an interpretation of the experience. It is the experience. The feeling you get doing this app is akin to the feeling you get from actually being in a piece of modern installation art. And for an exhibit designer like me, that’s exciting. I’m looking for ways that web, mobile and other experiences can be integrated with exhibit experiences, not be companion reference pieces, and you can’t get much more integrated than this. (Well, actually, you can, but I’ll save that for another time.)
At this point you may be asking “But if this is the experience, and it’s so interesting, won’t people just do this and never visit my museum?” I don’t think you should worry. It’s not the same as being in the installation, of course, and not the same as visiting Tate Modern. It’s a miniature version of those things, on a little glowing screen, after all. I think that for people who would be interested in the art piece itself, this app will make them even more interested. Take me, for example. I want to go see the piece in person even more, and I’ve mentioned it enthusiastically to a number of my friends.
The Role of Sound
Don’t forget those headphones. The sound is special in this app: it is 3D sound, which means that the sound coming from a virtual source on screen (some interesting floating thing that makes soft screechy noises, let’s say) appears to come from that direction no matter where you move. If a screechy thing is in front of you, the sound seems to be in front of you. If you move to the right of it, it seems to be coming from your left, and the screeching seems further away. Without headphones, or I suppose good speakers separated widely in a room sound system, you wouldn’t get this at all. This is a big part of what makes this app effective and memorable, because sound augments all the visual experiences.
Screen Orientation
As I mentioned above, the orientation is locked in widescreen. You hold your iPhone sideways all the time, not vertically, and not in a combination of orientations. Some of the “tour” type apps I mentioned above require you to constantly spin your iPhone as they switch from vertical to horizontal, and I didn’t realize how crazy this made me until I experienced How It Is. I believe a locked orientation, particularly in the less-common widescreen direction, is key to making a deeper, more immersive experience that you will remember. Of course, this wouldn’t work well on other mobile platforms that can’t switch orientation as fluidly, like Blackberrys or straight-up mobile phones browsing the mobile web, but I don’t think you could run this kind of immersion on the mobile web anyway.
Joystick
The way you get around in the app is with an on-screen joystick. For anyone who has done any gaming, a little touchscreen joystick is a somewhat laughable concept at first. And for those who are not used to video games, it might even be so unnatural that it thwarts your attempt to enjoy the app at all at first. Either way, you get used to it after a while and forget that it’s there, but I would say it is the one thing about this app that didn’t convince me. The rest of it is quite elegant and clever, the joystick isn’t. But since I can’t think of another way it could have been done, and since touchscreen joysticks are quite common in iPhone games, I don’t want to overstate it as a problem.
Wrapup
“How It Is” is an inspiring mobile museum experience, even verging on revolutionary. It is an excellent example of software genre matched to museum genre (first-person immersive game vs. installation art piece) and it goes well beyond the typical handheld tour to the point where the mobile experience has to be considered part of the art experience itself. It also holds a promise for new kind of museum mobile project, where well-integrated exhibit, website and mobile applications work together as parallel channels of experience, augmenting the visitor experience inside and outside the museum. I hope I will see many more apps like “How It Is.” My kitchen and my basement are waiting.
Quick Reference
Platform: iPhone app
Other platforms?: Yes, web version is similar
Genre: first-person immersive
Orientation: widescreen, fixed
Closed Captioning: none
Sound: rich 3D sound
Pros: very immersive, excellent use of sound, makes you feel like you are literally in the art
Cons: joystick nav is a bit clunky but necessary, app version has fewer goodies than web version
Recommended: yes
Links:
Tate Modern:
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
“How It Is” Web Site:
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/unilevermiroslawbalka/default.shtm
“How It Is” Web Experience:
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/unilevermiroslawbalka/explore/
“How It Is” App:
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/unilevermiroslawbalka/howitisapp.shtm
Champagne Valentine:
http://www.nexusproductions.com//directors/champagne-valentine/
iTunes Preview Site:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/how-it-is/id346192408?mt=8
CreativeApplications.net Coverage of How It Is App (and piles more incredibly interesting apps):
http://www.creativeapplications.net/iphone/how-it-is-iphone-events/
Creativity Review:
http://creativity-online.com/work/tate-modern-how-it-is-app/18951
Papervision:
http://blog.papervision3d.org/
About the Author:
Jonathan Alger follows new developments in exhibit design, museum planning and interactive public space at jonathanalger.com. He is a founding partner of the multidisciplinary design firm C&G Partners.
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Review of iAfrica: Connecting with Sub-Saharan Art, an iPhone app from MIA
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | No Comments
Robin White reviews the iphone app iAfrica: Connecting with Sub-Saharan Art, an iPhone app from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, on her blog, mediacombo.net/blog
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Museum of Islamic Art (MOIA), Doha, Qatar
Posted on | February 11, 2010 | 3 Comments
In December ‘09 I visited the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. As is well known, it is located on a small island off Doha’s Corniche (waterfront park and walkway.) In short, it is staggering achievement and belongs in a very short list of top museums world-wide. They got what the Pei’d for!
But aside from architecture per se, Wilmotte’s interiors, and the exhibition, and artifact mount system design is simply superlative; like the art, it is tightly structured but flexible. Stunningly lit, pretty well organized, my only quibble were the 15″ LCD panels looping in each gallery which were basically useless, distracting, and about 10% are already broken. I could go on about the design details but to the heart of the matter: the multimedia tour guide.
Disclosure: I was on a team that proposed a competitive system back in 2006 but I have to admit I am envious of the solution. While I didn’t tear the case off, I think it was a Fujitsu WinMo PDA with a custom interface. It was completely stable.
As in any device, there are the interface, content, and logistics to consider.
Interface
One annoyance struck me immediately, you were forced to listen to the intro and how to use the thing. I’ll try on the next trip to break that. (I couldn’t make the return visit so I don’t know for sure)
The screen layout was very pleasant, had excellent contrast, with a burgundy active area, charcoal controls and object title bands, with white type. All very readable in the darkened galleries.
The interface “buttons” were sized and spaced perfectly and I never made a mistaken entry.
Four control buttons run down the left side: Back, Home, Number pad, Map.
Numbers in the display cases, either alongside an artifact or standing in for clusters of objects like astrolabes, were entered using the number pad. This brought up what I call the Object Main screen.
On the Object Main screen there were 1 to 4 content asset choices, usually at least two.
The first asset was always “A Closer Look.” This is an odd phrase given that you had yet to have a first look. The Siguide equivalent was “About.”
There were no sub-menus so the other content titles were straightforward “one and done” taps as I call them. To keep the interface so admirably clean, the Content asset type was not signified eg video, audio, text etc.
A major interface annoyance was that when you entered an object number, the first content asset, “A Closer Look”, required another tap. Entering the number should be considered enough of an affirmative choice and that way you could let the device dangle on its lanyard and continue to look. I suspect this number-entry/tap may have been a major point of debate in the design process but since the asset menu persists through the initial audio, and it’s easy to quit a piece, I would have gone the other way.
The map button initialized a very informative world-map interface to appear. This was a really deep set of content; many Aribic cities, at least 30, were featured from India to Seville. Ken Burns-style panned images with voice-over communicated the importance and history of the cities and the art that flowered there. If an object was from Isfahan, tapping the Map icon in the Object Main screen mode brings up Isfahan and its content.
Disappointingly, I didn’t see a museum map on the device. For a large museum, it would have been very useful to be able to link object and museum space, and vice versa. Tap a gallery, see the objects. From an object, see where it is or where you are. My point is this: the numeric entry interface works great if you are in a gallery with a pile of stuff to investigate, but there was no way to “surf” the collection that I could find. If you are in the cafe on a break, and want to poke around to see what’s where, a spatial interface would have been ideal. Developers shoiuld always consider a three pronged approach for object interrogation: textual, numeric, and graphic.
Content:
I believe the upfront choices were English/Arabic and Adult /Child, but I didn’t get to return to try the kids content.
The sound quality was superb – deep and rich. The Arabic-male narrator was mature, warm, and conversationally knowledgeable. He delivered with hints of emotional inflection, as when describing Shah Jahan’s amulet of grief for his wife who died delivering their 13th child. He built the Taj Mahal in her memory.
The content assets were primarily audio, at least 80% I think. But, when an image, moving or otherwise, appeared on the screen, the copywriters gracefully incorporated a “now, if you would look at your screen you will see….” or whatever variation fit. It worked brilliantly. I have been a proponent of using more multimedia in these systems, but I thought the balance here was exactly what the subjects and objects needed. From what I saw, there was no camera-shot video in the guide, it was all animated stills with voice-over.
Asset run-times were longish. I’d often walk away looking for the next great thing while listening to the previous object’s information. That was fine because the asset came to its end about the same time you found another object of interest. It was consistently a near ideal pacing.
In a multimedia tour guide’s development, it is critical to determine how many objects will be interpreted. Hard to say how many MOIA objects were interpreted, no more than 10-15%, but invariably they were the significant ones you’d want to know about anyway.
Logistics
The museum is free, as is the guide in return for an ID. Suprisingly, there is no marketing, barely even signage for the guide and the tour desk is equally “obscure.” It’s in English and Arabic and looking around, I was surprised that the take-up wasn’t higher, as for me, it was an essential tool. I’d guess it was in the 15 to 20% range at most.
This was a straightforward closed-loop distribution scenario and they didn’t have to tie devices to a specific person.
It was evening when I visited so there was one attendant at the desk, it could handle three perhaps. The desk itself was clean and uncluttered as the designers were able to know this was an essential element of the lobby and it was perfectly integrated; no loose PDAs, cords, headsets could be seen.
The display concept was such that many objects had their own case. BTW, these were not your plain old pedestals and vitrines. They were gasket sealed, 15 to 20mm water-clear glass with no green tint, often spanning 4meters floor to ceiling. Other displays types included a matte finish, 100mm thick granite counters about 1 meter off the floor. Objects were fiber optically lit; the artifact mounts were so subtle, so perfectly made, they reminded me of childhood dental appliances! Object labels and number tags were in medium gray with white type and clearly visible.
While the device was perfectly stable, I heard from a colleague that their 15 year old son managed to get past the tour program and play with the operating system’s games so securitizing that secret key-combo for administration is still an important factor for any platform to consider.
Summary
The MOIA guide is a well refined, not too adventurous, tour guide. That said, it is an essential tool to have during the visit if you are not familiar with Islamic Art and Architecture.
My wish-list for the guide is short:
1. An interactive Museum Map for collections surfing.
2. A session-based personal scrapbook so you could say to friends “did you see this?” (the enhancement is of course a web-based scrapbook but it adds a lot of complexity)
3. I had a couple of hours to visit and didn’t see half the museum so I’d have appreciated a highlight tour.
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Dinosaurs: The American Museum of Natural History App
Posted on | February 9, 2010 | 2 Comments
I was excited to see a tweet from Laura Mann about the American Museum of Natural History’s new app in the iTunes store: Dinosaurs. At under 50mb, I was able to download it without deleting anything off my iPhone. But the handy size and simple, three-button navigation interface, does not mean the app skimps on content!
The ‘home page’ and one of the three navigation links is a mosaic of a dinosaur head, composed of photos from the Dinosaur collection at AMNH. Zoom in (via multitouch or double-tapping) to see each photo on its own with tombstone info, a short description and social media functions: you can comment on each photo or send it to a friend. Finally! A museum app that feels like it was made for an iPhone, rather than being an illustrated translation of a traditional audio tour (see Koven Smith on this problem with multimedia tours).
Turning the iPhone horizontally enlarges the image to fill the screen. The responses of the mosaic interface could be tweaked a bit: I sometimes had trouble zooming into the photo I wanted – it would give me the adjacent photo instead. And to get back to the right one, I had to go all the way back to the full overview and zoom back in again; it could take some panning around to find the photo I wanted again amongst so many.
The second interface button gives access to six ‘Stories’: illustrated text pages about each major dinosaur type with histories of their excavation and the people who brought them to the Museum. No video or fancy interactives, but there’s something for everyone in the information available: from history buffs to scientists to those who just like to look at dinosaur pics, you can easily hone in on the pages of interest to you and skip the rest. Move through the pages by swiping left and right. To go back to the story menu, tap on the page to get a ‘back’ button to appear at the top of the screen.
The ‘About’ section (the third interface button) says four more stories will come soon. It also gives us instructions on using the tour, a bibliography, and bios of the developers and Dr. Lowell Dingus who is, presumably, the curator of the content in the app.
The app is free from iTunes and was developed by AMNH with Mosaic Legends and 33Delivered. I was kind of surprised that the link to Mosaic Legends from the app doesn’t take us to an iPhone or mobile-ready site; in fact, the first link I clicked, to one of their other iPhone apps (which seem to be two Grateful Dead and a Ziggy Stardust app), took me to a Flash demo I couldn’t see on the iPhone!
Overall a nice little app, and a good illustration of the kind of bite-sized, straight-to-product approach that Koven Smith has advocated. I also like that it works without lots of fancy video or interactive content, so suggests that this quality of mobile content is more easily within the means of museums to produce in-house.
Tags: 33Delivered > American Museum of Natural History > AMNH > app > dinosaurs > iPhone > Laura Mann > Mosaic Legends
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Yours, Vincent: Van Gogh Museum’s iPhone app
Posted on | February 8, 2010 | 3 Comments
Robin White reviews the iphone app Yours, Vincent: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, a portable version of the Van Gogh Letters Project at the Van Gogh Museum, on her blog, mediacombo.net/blog
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iPod tour at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
Posted on | January 29, 2010 | No Comments
Koven Smith reviews the iPod Touch tour of the “Design USA: Contemporary Innovation” show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum on his blog, Koven J. Smith dot com.
Tags: Cooper-Hewitt > design > Design USA: Contemporary Innovation > exhibition > handheld > iPod Touch > Koven Smith > multimedia > museum > Smithsonian > tour
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TAP: TourML-based multimedia tour at the IMA
Posted on | November 3, 2009 | No Comments
Graduate students in the Fall 2009 Museums and Technology class of the Museums Studies program from the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis have been reviewing the TAP tour currently at the Indianapolis Museum of Art as part of the Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World exhibition. Their comments are blogged on the course wiki. TAP is built with TourML by the team at the IMA.
Tags: Daniel Incandela > IMA > Indianapolis > iPod Touch > IUPUI > multimedia tour > museum studies > Reviews > TAP > TourML
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Poughkeepsie Bridge Walkway Tour
Posted on | October 8, 2009 | 1 Comment
The bridge, see www.walkway.org offers spectacular views from 250 feet above the Hudson River and is a perfect viewshed for interpreting many aspects of the areas cultural and natural history, a true interpretopia! It’s a free state park so they’ll get a lot of the locals who live nearby using the bridge for an evening passagetti.
The tour is a Guide by Cell product with 21 stops over the +-1.5 mile long bridge call 845 201 3187 and press 1#, 15# 40# for samples. The stops are signified by overly modest graphics done by the walkway organization; I missed several POIs because the signs weren’t visible given the crowds leaning over the railings and covering them up.
The takeup rate looked very low. Partly becuase the marketing was weak and also because they missed 1/2 of their audience: non-english speakers out for a stroll, and teens.
The audio quality was very bad through both cell and landline when I checked it.
The content is routine and boring. There were a few bits about the animals, a segment or two about Poughkeepsie history, a few very nice oral history segments about the famous fire on the bridge, and railroad days gone by, but nothing about the geology of the area (which is why the bridge is over 200 high!) and as I said, all in English.
Of course, I longed for multimedia content.
All in all, a C+
Scott
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The Warhol Live audio tour at the De Young Museum
Posted on | July 12, 2009 | No Comments
A podcast review of the Warhol Live exhibition tour at the De Young Museum in San Francisco (Feb 14-May 17, 2009), recorded 24 Feb 2009.
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MoMA Wifi
Posted on | July 12, 2009 | No Comments
Vodcast of Deb Howes and Titus Bicknell starting the new year right by checking out MoMA Wifi Tours, January 1, 2009. See also the March 8, 2009 podcast interview with Lotte Meijer, developer of the MoMA Wifi Tours.