Last week I spoke at The Tech Museum’s Interfaces for the New Decade Conference and Gallery Opening. It was a great opportunity to meet and connect with folks from many of the Bay Area museums (and local companies) who share the same interest in new HCI (Human Computer Interaction) technologies. Along with the day-long conference there was an evening Gallery opening which unveiled The Tech Test Zone exhibit.
At the opening party we demoed Heist, our experimental project that allows digital objects to be shared from a multitouch table to visitor’s smart phones and tablets. We brought a MT55 Platform multitouch table for the demo and conference. While Heist is not part of the permanent exhibit our Open Exhibit’s Kinect and Gigapixel Viewer software is. Visitors to the Test Zone can use gestures to navigate an amazing gigapixel image of Yosemite taken by xRez Studio. This Open Exhibits software exhibit is among the first installations in our year-old National Science Foundation sponsored project. (You can join Open Exhibits for free.) CNET News has pictures of all of the exhibits including our and their Website, see Future tech exhibit plugs museum interactivity.
Ideum will be presenting the new MT55 Pro multitouch table with Magian Media Studio at the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) Expo 2011, in Orlando next week. Learn more about the conference on the IAAPA website.
The Expo runs Nov. 14-18, 2011, at the Orange County Convention Center.
Please stop by Booth #750 if you will be in attendance. We look forward to connecting with you in Orlando!
Tomorrow, I’m participating in a session entitled, Open Source for Museums: The Experiment Continues at the American Association of Museums (AAM) annual conference. This is a follow up to a session to one I was involved in two years ago. I’m representing the Open Exhibits software initiative. Here’s the description for the session:
Join the project leads of Pachyderm, Omeka, CollectionSpace and Open Exhibits for an introduction to open source and a frank discussion of the promises and potential pitfalls of open source software in the museum world. Learn about the origin and forms of the open source software movement and about the history of its application in the museums.
Hope to see some of you tomorrow! Bright and early, it is a 9AM session.
In the session, I’m going to be talking about the multitouch Gulf Oil Spill Mashup application that we produced last summer and provided free of charge to museums and aquariums. The application was built with the GestureWorks multitouch SDK and many of the software components in the application available free on the Open Exhibits website.
In case you missed it, here’s a video of the application in action.
I will post my slides here following my presentation. Looking forward to hearing how others in the museum community responded to Gulf Coast oil spill.
Updated May 24, 2010: It was a great session to be part of and I found the other presentations really inspiring. In particular, I really enjoyed the talk by Jerry Enzler, the Executive Director of the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium. Last summer, their institution opened a major exhibit on the Gulf of Mexico. Their large aquarium tanks were deliberately presented with no fish or any marine life. The tanks were covered with decals representing oil from the spill.
It was a great example of a museum (and aquarium) taking risks and making a strong statement about the environmental disaster that occurred in the gulf. The opening of this unique exhibit was a great success and the story appeared in the national news. At the time, there were stories about the exhibit in MSNBC, USA Today, and many other media outlets.
I hope to post more about the session in the future, as all of the presentations were very interesting. For now, here are the slides from my presentation, Gulf Oil Spill Mashup Exhibit (PDF 3.7 MB)
In February, I’ll be presenting at the Blur Conference in Orlando, Florida. My talk will focus on what we’ve learned from developing multitouch and multiuser installations over the last few years.
The Blur Conference focuses on the new ways in which people are interacting with computers. This is first time this event has ever been held. So what is Blur about? From the conference webpage…
It’s easy to forget that the computer mouse is over 45 years old.
What’s not as easy to forget is that we’re now collectively getting used to interacting with computers via means and interfaces that have moved way beyond the keyboard and the mouse — the iPhone and Wii being the most prominent examples.
The truth is that we stand on the verge of a major revolution in the models of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). A revolution that will fly right past academic and into a world of retail, medical, gaming, military, public event, sporting, personal and marketing applications.
From multi-touch to motion capture to spatial operating environments, over the next 10 years, everything we know about HCI will change.
Blur is the only conference that is exploring the line of interaction between computers and humans in a substantive, real-world and hands-on way.
I’ll be presenting, “New Museum Experiences: Learning from Multitouch and Multiuser Installations” on February 22nd. I’ll also be on a panel that same afternoon talking about Kinect and our Open Exhibits module. You can learn more about the Blur conference on their website.
We’re at CES for the first time this year, promoting GestureWorks and our new partnership with Touch Revolution. While we’ve attended many trade shows and conferences, CES is a spectacle unlike any we’ve seen before, and it seems appropriate that it takes place in Las Vegas.
A visitor manipulates a 3D molecule with our Molecule Viewer app
We’ve noticed 3D and touch are two of the year’s buzzwords, appearing everywhere at CES, so our multitouch 3D molecule viewer fits right in. Built specially for CES, the viewer allows you to manipulate a molecule in 3D space. Shown here on the TRū Touch Monitor, the molecule viewer is the most educationally focused application we’re showing this year. The app offers molecular structure and information for five of the active ingredients in Red Bull, which seemed appropriate for a tech conference.
Gene Halsey from Touch Revolution demos our X-ray app
Robots are also a big hit at this year’s CES, even if they just jitter and giggle. We haven’t gotten into robotics (yet), but you can see the X-ray insides of a toy robot with our X-ray viewer. The app allows you to switch from the visible view of an object to the X-ray view with a simple double tap, and was based on one of our most popular exhibits.
And, if you just want to play a game, there’s always Astrotouch, our multitouch version of Asteroids.
As we announced yesterday, we recently partnered with Touch Revolution to create a series of GestureWorks applications for their hardware demos. We’ve been lucky enough the past few weeks to get to play around with the new 21.5″ TRū Touch monitors, which Touch Revolution will be debuting at CES. The TRū Touch monitors are full HD (1920 x 1080), bezel-less, and, like these concept screens, you can tilt them to horizontal angles to make tasks like typing and drawing easier.
We’ve been testing our apps for CES on the TRū Touch, including an amazing gigapixel image viewer that allows you to zoom in close enough to see rock climbers on El Capitan in Yosemite and a 3D object viewer, but so far the hands-down favorite has been Astrotouch, our multitouch version of Asteroids.
The game has a series of old school-style arcade controls at the bottom, and we’ve been nothing but impressed with the screen’s responsiveness and accuracy. Some of the other hardware we had in-house had trouble with ghost points on the controls, but the TRū Touch screen handled it flawlessly every time.
Check out the video above for a sneak peek at the new Touch Revolution hardware, and be sure to visit us at CES. We’ll be at the Touch Revolution Booth, #21755, South Hall Lower Level with a full set of great multitouch applications on display and free gesture illustration posters to give away.
Ideum is teaming up with Touch Revolution to offer GestureWorks, our Flash multitouch framework, as part of a software bundle that will be included with the new 21.5″ TRū™ Touch Monitor.
Developers will be able to purchase this cutting-edge, high definition monitor with GestureWorks at CES 2011 in Las Vegas for the show price of $995. This bundle will be available after CES through the Touch Revolution online store.
This is the first time GestureWorks has been bundled with a major hardware manufacturer, and it’s great to be working with a company that has such extensive experience with multitouch hardware. Touch Revolution is part of the TPK Group, which manufactures screens for companies such as Apple, Sony Ericsson, Microsoft, Palm, Research in Motion, and Motorola.
We’ll be in the Touch Revolution booth at CES this week. We’ll be showing a variety of GestureWorks-developed applications, including a gigapixel photographic viewer and a touch-enabled version of Asteroids. The gigapixel photographic viewer will be released on the Open Exhibits website later this month.
Come see us at the Touch Revolution Booth, # 21755 at the 2011 International CES in Las Vegas, January 6-9. Enter to win 1 of 10 Tru Touch Monitors bundled with GestureWorks.
Update: January 5, 2011: You can read about Touch Revolution Tru Touch Monitor Line in Engadget.
Later this month, I will presenting a day-long workshop at the Museum Computer Network (MCN) annual conference in Austin, Texas. Make It Multitouch will explore technology and design issues concerning multitouch development in museums. Most of the day is dedicated to museum exhibits and hands-on design exercises. However, I will spend some time talking about Android 2.2 and Flash and showing some working examples. Android 2.2, Adobe Flash, and GestureWorks present a real alternative to Apple’s iOS for multitouch development for personal devices.
Here’s the short description for the workshop: Multitouch exhibits allow designers to move away from traditional graphical user-interfaces and incorporate more natural and intuitive controls. Additionally, multiuser exhibits encourage social interaction in ways that traditional computer exhibits can’t.
Multitouch technology is no longer just a novelty, it is moving into the mainstream. This major technological change presents exhibit developers with new and exciting design challenges. In this full-day workshop, we’ll explore a variety of multitouch technologies including off-the-shelf multitouch-enabled PCs.
In addition, we will explain the software development process and show examples developed in Adobe Flash and Flex with Open Exhibits and GestureWorks for a variety of hardware platforms including smart phones and tablets. We’ll see how multi-touch technology is used to browse multimedia elements, RSS Feeds, mapping services, and other Web-based applications and mash-ups.
Through engaging rapid design exercises we’ll explore and discuss the conceptual, informational, and user-interface aspects of multi-touch and multi-user design.
The GestureWorks team from Ideum is currently at Flashbelt 2010 in Minneapolis, MN. We want to learn how you are using (or plan to use) multitouch in your projects, and to discuss our road map for true multitouch in Flash, Flex and beyond.
Come by to say hi and talk to the lead developer of GestureWorks, Chris Gerber. We’re offering GestureWorks license discounts for Flashbelt participants. We’re also showcasing our MT-50 multiouch table and new 3M multitouch screen running GestureWorks-built applications.
So far our time here at FlashBelt 2010 has been great. We’ll continue to tweet selected presentations throughout the week. Follow us @gestureworks or search #flashbelt for updates.
Tomorrow, I’m participating in a session entitled, 
