We’ve just launched our 2009 Survey on computer-based interactive exhibits in museums for the Open Exhibits project.  We encourage you to take the survey.  Open Exhibits is a planned open source initiative for informal science education. We are reworking our proposal for the National Science Foundation to include feedback from reviews (although most of the comments from this round were very positive.)  We are also going to be adding support for multitouch gestures and multiuser interaction into the proposal.

There’s more about the project and the results from our 2008 survey on OpenExhibits.org. Last year we received 125 responses to the survey, we are trying to match that number this year. Also, we encourage you to join our Facebook group. We’ll be posting the results of the survey in late spring on the Open Exhibits website.

Just last week we completed an installation of a multitouch, multiuser table exhibit and two multitouch enabled kiosks for Vulcan Park and Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. The Birmingham Today exhibition space has floor-to-ceiling windows on one side and provides a dramatic view of the city. For exhibits, we worked closely with the museum and focused on exploring Birmingham and the surrounding region through interactive maps, panoramic images, and community-provided photography.

For our second multitouch table installation, we designed a mapping and photo mashup application. (Similar to the one we completed for our first table installation at the Don Harrington Discovery Center in Amarillo, Texas)  For Vulcan Park and Museum, we developed a multitouch panoramic viewing application that runs on two HP TouchSmart kiosks.

Like the touch table exhibit, these kiosks use NUI Snowflake software with custom Flash software which we developed.  The panoramic viewer allows for simple pinch gesture to zooming of a panoramic photograph that we took from a top the Vulcan Park statue.  Users can also flip (or flick) photographs in a photo viewer window that is connected to points of interest on the panoramic image. We designed and developed the stand and exhibit-case for the HP TouchSmart.  This platform provides a low-cost touch and  multiouch platform for computer exhibits.  There’s more about the panoramic viewer application in our portfolio.

Here are some photographs for the opening party for Birmingham Today.

Visitors interact with the interactive map and photographs of Birmingham.

You couldn’t tear some visitors away from the touch table.

The multitouch-enabled panoramic viewers were placed by the large windows in the gallery space allows visitors to explore the Birmingham Skyline.