May
10
Ted Forbes, Multimedia Producer at the Dallas Museum of Art, introduces the Museum’s mobile project and his recent work developing a mobile browser-based solution for the Museum’s upcoming exhibition tour. Ted will be sharing the code for this project through the Museums to Go wiki pages. Here are the wireframes for this solution.
[...] house the collaborative project pages. Since then the Dallas Museum of Art has already developed a prototype mobile web-based solution, which Ted Forbes demonstrates in a wonderful little video available both on the wiki and in the [...]
One question: are you designing it so an image will be onscreen (for example a painting) while the audio plays, or does it simply open the QuickTime player?
This looks really exciting — an elegant, simple design — thanks for sharing.
Wow! Impressed!
Ben – its using quicktime so as an MP3 file – no. But you can do an mp4 file with images.
I will do more podcasts on this – just been swamped this week trying to get it all done
Beth – thanks!
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I find your project very interessant. Do you know if others museums on the world are developping the same prototypes? Are there some interactive maps in your project? Are you thinking about GPS functionnalities? Is your application only for Iphone? Have you done some tests with public? I am very curious to know more about your project..
Julie –
Our model is much like what Chris Alexander has developed at San Jose. Our navigation is modeled in a map like way, but more as a directory at this point. As far as GPS, not at this point. Its simply not accurate enough to do anything inside our museum with the current state of technology, so this has become extremely low priority until things change. Our app is iPhone only, but phase two is to include Blackeberry support which has proven to be a big challenge. We just launched literally this week. I’ll be doing another podcast in the next few weeks.
What about RFID for the localisation inside the museum? First I thought that localisation was not very important inside a museum (or maybe less interesting than outside) but with programs which let the visitor creating their owns tours (selecting preferences, interests or a specific artist for example), it’s very interesting to be able to guide visitors throught the collections. But It may be more interesting for important museums.
good luck for the next steps
Julie,
Although I think location-tracking and location-based services for mobile tours can cost more than they are worth in many cases (when it’s not so hard and is much cheaper for visitors to use a keypad, map, or other visual interface to navigate tour content manually in smaller programs), I do think there is a place for RFID in some environments, and particularly in large museums. As you suggest, visitors to large museums like the Louvre or the Met can really use help finding their way around, and it may not be possible to install Wifi or other sorts of invasive technology in their historic buildings. Periodic RFID or other radio-based location points at key intersections, or in major galleries could help with orientation in combination with manual navigation for the majority of the area & content so that the museum doesn’t have to install an RFID tag with every object, for example – which can become prohibitively expensive to install and maintain in a large collection, no made how cheap the RF tags get!
Espro was trialling a solution similar to this at Musée d’Orsay a couple of years ago but I don’t know if it ever went live.
Here is a paper I wrote about wireless and location-based solutions for mobile tours some time ago, but I think the basic conclusions and recommendations are still valid: http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim05/Proctor.pdf
[...] Dallas Museum of Art [...]
Nancy,
I read your paper about wireless and location-based solutions and I found it very interesting! Thanks for the link.
Ted,
I have one question more. Do youn have an idea of how many people among your public will own an Iphone? or an other Smartphone? I am wondering if the proportion of visitors who will be able to use this king of application will be important or not? Do you know some studies about that?
Thanks,
[...] as brilliant, creative and resourceful as Chris Alexander from San Jose Museum of Art and Ted Forbes of Dallas Museum of Art. In this podcast, Chris & Ted walk us through their developments of [...]
Hello Ted,
I kind of think like Julie about Apple’s proprietary environment. What is nice about the whole idea of web app or online app (whatever you call it) is that eventually it should free museums from managing hardwares on site.
What I understand from your application is that you still need to provide in the museum iPod Touch to the public in case they don’t own an iPhone/iPod. It is still a bit cumbersome to me.
I know all this has probably to do with hardware manufacturers but I am still dreaming of the one web app that can be downloaded on line and off-line onto all players.
Now you say that your app is open source. How would you consider licencing it for diffusion in France for instance?
Cheers.
Julie –
I’ll see if I can pull some numbers on that – we’re in a very early stage having just launched. We’ve only begun to collect this information.
We purchased 20 iPods that are kept at visitor services for people who don’t have smart phones.
Hope that helps…
We have build a similar audiotour for iphone using iui.
http://tinyurl.com/ledck5.
Don’t play it with IE; that gives problems. it is about 70Mb. Firefox gives minor problems.
For our main exhibition we made 3 tours: a contextual sequence, a tour by artist and a tour by location.
We have some minor wifi problems in the museum.
[...] An early version of this spec (TourML – pronounced turmoil) can be seen in action in the Dallas Museum of Art’s new mobile tour. You can read more about our progress on the Museum Mobile Wiki, follow the effort on twitter [...]