This week we will be exhibiting at the American Association of Museums (AAM) annual meeting and expo. We will have a booth (#1830) and we’ll be showing our multitouch table along with some of the custom multitouch applications we’ve developed

In addition, I am the chair for a session entitled, Open Source for Museums: The Next Experiment in Museum Technology. We have a great panel and one that represents most of the major open source initiatives in the museum world. The presenters are: Scott Sayre from Pachyderm, Tom Scheinfeldt  from Omeka, Carl Goodman from CollectionSpace, and Bryan Kennedy from Science Buzz  who will explain how Drupal was used in development of their site. In addition to these direct connections, some in the group (myself included) are advisors on other open source projects such as Fluid Engage and Steve. 

Last year, I wrote an article for the National Association for Museum Exhibition’s Journal, Exhibitionist, where I interviewed most of the panel members about their projects.  The article was reposted in the Ideum blog see Open Source Software: New Possibilities for Museums. The article has also just recently been translated into Czech and appears in Muzeum, the magazine of the Narodni Muzeum in Prague.  

In the AAM session, I won’t be talking much about Open Exhibits, as we are going to focus on projects that are already fully underway. (We are resubmitting our proposal to NSF and we are are still looking for museum professionals to fill out our survey on computer interactives in museums.)  I look forward to seeing some of you at AAM in Philadelphia.

Update May 5, 2009: I will be posting PDFs of the slides presented during the session. Here’s the introduction to Open Source Software: New Possibilities for Museums (PDF 900K). It includes links to all of the projects mentioned and references.

Update May 6, 2009: Two more presentations in PDF form here. Omeka: Open Source Web Publishing for Museums (PDF 2Megs) by Tom Scheinfeldt and Museum Open Source: Make or Break – Pachyderm Retrospective (PDF 740K) by Scott Sayre.

On Wednesday, Paul Lacey and I will be conducting a full-day workshop entitled, Make It Multitouch at the Museums and the Web Conference in Indianapolis. We’ll be explaining the technical aspects of multitouch and exploring emerging design practices through a series of exercises. I posted some initial thoughts on design multitouch and multiuser exhibits back in February, in three parts; Interaction and Feedback, Elements, Objects, and Environments, and the Visitor-Experience. During the workshop, we’ll look at the concepts presented in these posts along with other activities with some new additions. An important new area for discussion is the use of physical objects (with fiducial markers) in conjunction with multitouch tables.  A very interesting example came out just last week from the Media Computing Group, part of the Computer Science Department at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. Called, Slap Widgets these physical user-interface components work in conjunction with multitouch tables. The Media Computing Group has put together a short video explaining how Silicone ILluminated Active Peripherals, or SLAP widgets work.   In our workshop, we are primarily concerned with the implications of multitouch and multiuser interactions, still it is hard not to think about the possibilities that physical objects can present for computer-based exhibits.  I don’t think a silicon slider or knob would last a day on the museum floor, but after working with hands-on science centers and other museums for so many years, the connection between computing and more physical interaction presented in this example is certainly intriguing. We’ll post more about the conference and the workshop later this week.

Update April 20, 2009: Shelly Mannion has some photos of multitouch table at MW2009.  You can see the photos that are tagged, multitouch in her Flickr group.

Also, here is a picture we took of our multitouch table and the Microsoft Surface. We were moving out the our exhibit space, when we came across a Microsoft Surface set up for the a demo the next day. You can see more pictures in our Flickr set multitouch exhibits.

Update April 17, 2009:  Paula Bray wrote a story about the workshop for Fresh + New(er) blog entitled, MW2009 – Multi-touch: what does this technology hold for future museum exhibits?

Update April 16, 2009: Thanks to everyone who attended it was a fun day. Here’s the Introductory Presentation and the Design Considerations presentation in PDF format.

Last night Ideum was one of nine organizations recognized at the New Mexico Technology Council’s Fourth Annual TechEx Awards. Sponsored in part by New Mexico Business Weekly, the awards were held at the Hyatt Regency in Albuquerque.

We received a New Mexico Technology Solution Award for the MT2 Multitouch, Multiuser Table.  Some of the other awardees included Intel Corporation, Nuvita, Qwest, and Cisco. You can learn more about the New Mexico Technology Council and the TechEx Awards on their Website.