Comments on: Dallas Museum of Art

By: In Response to Nina Simon: Bait and Switch | Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:58:00 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: jan klink

jan klink — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:36:10 +0000

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.

By: Ted Forbes

Ted Forbes — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:24:52 +0000

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…

By: Vincent

Vincent — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:51:23 +0000

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.

By: MuseumMobile » Chris & Ted’s Excellent iPod Tours

MuseumMobile » Chris & Ted’s Excellent iPod Tours — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:40:03 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: julie

julie — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:42:35 +0000

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,

By: MuseumMobile Wiki » Updates to the Museum Mobile wiki on 12 July 2009

MuseumMobile Wiki » Updates to the Museum Mobile wiki on 12 July 2009 — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:23:13 +0000

[...] Dallas Museum of Art [...]

By: Nancy Proctor

Nancy Proctor — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:28:35 +0000

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

By: julie

julie — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:09:14 +0000

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

By: Ted Forbes

Ted Forbes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:06:12 +0000

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.