Later this spring,  I will be teaching a course on exhibit development for the Cultural Resource Management Program at the University of Victoria. The course will be held in Toronto at the Ontario Science Centre from April 22-24. It is a blended course, so an online component proceeds the three days, starting on April 9.  You can learn more about, Emerging Exhibits: Exploring New Models of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and register on the UVIC Website. (FYI, when I taught the course at the Museum of Vancouver last fall it sold out fast.)  Here’s a short description of the course:

Computer-based interactive exhibits are undergoing a major transformation. The lone, single-user kiosk is now being replaced by multi-touch tables and walls, motion-sensing spaces, networked installations, and RFID-based exhibits. Advances in augmented reality, speech recognition, eye tracking, and other technologies promise even more radical change for exhibits in the near future.

Collectively these new technologies represent a fundamental advance in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). This course will look at a new generation of computer-based exhibits that are more physical, more intuitive, and have more social qualities than their predecessors.

The new models for HCI provide us with opportunities to rethink how technology is used in museums and other public spaces. Computer technology is on the cusp of finally living up to its promise in the museum world, providing a platform for developing compelling and authentic experiences for the public.

Early next month, 100 Years of State & Federal Policy: The Impact on Pueblo Nations exhibition opens at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The exhibit is tied to the state of New Mexico’s Centennial which happens this year. We’ve  been working with the Cultural Center to develop two interactive exhibits for the exhibition. We’re designing the software and hardware, the Cultural Center has been been developing media including a series of videos for the exhibit.

The Document Table is a multitouch table exhibit that allows visitors to learn more about the important events that have impacted the Pueblo Nations over the last 100 years. Along with exploring the documents, visitors can view them on a large, 55″ secondary screen adjacent to the table. (The multitouch table is an MT55 Platform with custom color.)

The Interactive Timeline is a dual monitor exhibit that uses a custom-built, touch-enabled ultra-wide display to present the timeline. (The ultra-wide display has a 16:4.5 aspect ratio, 1920 x 508 pixels, you can see a photo of touch display on our Flickr site.) As visitors make selections a large 42″ display presents video, photos, and descriptive text. Both exhibits are using software components from Open Exhibits.

These two interactive exhibits will help communicate the overall message of the exhibition:

This exhibition and its public programming will reflect upon the human experience behind enacted policies and laws on Pueblo communities by other governments. It will add to a well-documented history of Pueblo resilience since the time of Emergence. Interviews with Pueblo members will provide visitors with historical and personal reflections to help them understand and appreciate these historic challenges, often imposed through policy and laws, all intended to purposefully remove Pueblo people away from their core values.

The opening is on February 4, 2012 at 1:00 PM. There are a number of events associated with the exhibition planned through the rest of the year. You can learn more on the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center website: www.indianpueblo.org/100years

Our commercial multitouch framework, GestureWorks 3 is now available. There are a lot of new features including the introduction of the Gesture Markup Language, the world’s first markup language for multitouch. GestureML allows developers to rapidly change gesture interaction even after an application has been built. This flexibility helps address challenges in the design process, as creating user interface for multitouch and multiuser applications is still a new endeavor.

GestureWorks 3 is completely rebuilt and we greatly improved the way the software analyzes gesture interaction.  With GestureWorks 3, “objects” behave more like objects do in real world and the software can determine no only user touch points, but also their orientation.  To demonstrate this new feature we developed a built-in gesture visualizer.  Here’s a video of the gesture visualizer.

There’s lots more in GestureWorks 3, you can learn more on the GestureWorks website or check out the Press Release on PR Newswire.

Next Tuesday we will be release a new version of GestureWorks, our multitouch framework for ActionScript. GestureWorks 3 is an entirely new build, we started over and rebuilt it from scratch.

GestureWorks developers will have access to the most advanced multitouch authoring environment yet developed. It includes a comprehensive Gesture Visualizer, a built-in multitouch simulator, and it introduces the world’s first markup language for multitouch; Gesture ML with definitions for scores of gestures.  ActionScript developers in Flash, Flash Builder, Flash Develop, and FDT can creating powerful gesture-driven apps that can be published as SWF files, exe, or AIR apps.

In a year where there has been seemingly no positive news about Adobe Flash, we think GestureWorks is great news for Flash developers. We believe that ActionScript and Flash are important and powerful tools for application development. While HTML5 has a great deal of promise, and it will likely be increasingly important in the future; it lacks the power and flexibility that ActionScript and Flash currently provide. We need to make applications now and we’re not alone.

GestureWorks 3 was major effort here at Ideum and it represents almost a year of development. GestureWorks is primarily self-funded, however, the project did receive some important help and we are very thankful to have received $100,000 from the Venture Acceleration Fund (VAF) launched by Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The software and the new website will be unveiled next Tuesday, November 29th. We’re excited, we hope you are too.

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.

Our Open Exhibits multitouch software initiative has just completed its first year. Last year, we received funding from the National Science Foundation and we launched our full community site last November. We’ve learned a lot in year one and we are gearing up for an exciting second year.

If you haven’t been following developments on the Open Exhibits site, here’s an update:

The Heist project was announced today. Heist is an experimental project that uses Open Exhibits and GestureWorks software and is powered by Sensus server technology to enable effortless networking. It allows museum visitors to “steal” digital objects; easily placing them on their smart phones or tablets.

The system uses a captive WiFi portal to push an HTML5 app to visitors so there is no need to download an iOS or Android app. The visitor just connects to WiFi and opens their browser. We are planning a testbed with ten museums this winter.  Learn more and check out a video of Heist.

Open Exhibits is on the road in October and November. There are presentations and workshops planned on both coasts and in Europe. We’ll be at Association of Science- Technology Center’s (ASTC) annual conference in Baltimore, the British Museum in London, and at The Tech Museum in San Jose. We will have one of our MT55 Platform Multitouch Tables at the British Museum if you want to check it out.

Work has begun on a new version of our most downloaded software module, the multitouch-enabled Collection Viewer. We’ve posted preliminary designs and have explained the new features that will become available in the new version.

Open Exhibits surpassed 10,000 software downloads last month and our community now has over 1,700 members. If you haven’t already done so, please join us. We are looking forward to an eventful second year.

This short video shows the multitouch wall exhibit, Tiny Drifters, which we helped develop for Monterey Bay Aquarium. The video will give you an idea of how the whole exhibit came together. As I mentioned in prior posts, this touch wall has some very unique qualities…

First off, it is big. It has a seven-foot diameter glass surface and while there are certainly bigger multitouch walls out there, few match our resolution at 2560 x 2560 pixels (better than HD) or if they do, they often aren’t contiguous. Many walls are made up of a number of separate panels or cells. Also, our wall is round, which by itself makes this an unusual installation. Additionally, the fact that this exhibit is permanent (many other walls are temporary) presented challenges along the way, as we used thick tempered glass and other hardened materials to build the wall.

The exhibit can track an almost unlimited number of points (hundreds) allowing for multiple visitors to interact simultaneously. We used a series of low-powered 5 milliwatt lasers successfully to provide the infrared light for the tracking. The exhibit has a relatively simple four camera system to capture the touch points. The software and beautiful 3D plankton models were created by Lindsay Digital using Unity. The group at the Monterey Bay Aquarium developed the concept and put together the team.

If you haven’t read them already, there are a series of posts on the development of this exhibit. See Building a Multitouch Wall Part 5 and you can work your way through the series. There’s information about all our partners on the project, the equipment used, and the design and engineering challenges we faced. As always, we welcome your feedback and questions.

The photo courtesy of Lindsay Digital. The video was shot by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

This fall I will be teaching a course on exhibit development for the Cultural Resource Management Program at the University of Victoria. The course will be held in Vancouver at the Museum of Vancouver from September 26 -28. It is a blended course, so an online component proceeds the three days, starting on September 12th. You can learn more about, Emerging Exhibits: Exploring New Models of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and register on the UVIC Website. Here’s a short description of the course:

Computer-based interactive exhibits are undergoing a major transformation. The lone, single-user kiosk is beginning to be replaced by multitouch tables and walls, motion-sensing spaces, networked installations, and RFID-based exhibits. Advances in augmented reality, voice recognition, eye tracking, and other technologies promise even more radical change for exhibits in the near future.

Collectively these new technologies represent a fundamental advance in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). This course will look at a new generation of computer-based exhibits that are more physical, more intuitive, and have more social qualities than their predecessors.

For decades, museum and education professionals have understood that interesting and provocative exhibitions and exhibits can encourage dialogue and deepen the visitor experience. However, until recently, the vast majority of the computer-based exhibits have been information-heavy kiosks with limited interactivity, providing only solitary experiences for visitors. The new models for HCI provide us with opportunities to rethink how technology is used in museums and other public spaces. Computer technology is on the cusp of finally living up to its promise in the museum world, providing a platform for developing compelling and authentic experiences for the public.

Our commercial multitouch SDK, GestureWorks has support for over 200 gestures. To help our users better understand what’s available in the GestureWorks software package, last year we made a poster showing most of the gestures included. The PDF poster and all of the illustrations are freely available through a Creative Commons attribution license. Now, we’ve taken a step further and have put together a font family called Gesture.

This family of typefaces includes three variations of the stroke alphabet and one font of the multitouch icons or “dingbats.”  The font is free (again through a Creative Commons attribution license).  You can find the Gesture font, poster and all of the illustrations on the GestureWorks Open Source Gesture Library page.

This is the fifth blog post about our multitouch wall installation.  To see the previous ones see: Building a High-Resolution Multitouch Wall Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3 & Part 4.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, while we received permission to share the development process we’ve been unable to say just which “major North American aquarium” we have been working with. Now we can share the name and we are proud to say it is the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The 7- foot, round multitouch wall that we’ve been developing will be part of the Open Sea exhibition which is fully open to public on July 2nd.  You can learn more about the Open Sea exhibition in Monterey Bay Aquarium Pressroom.

The previous blog posts detail the methods, materials, hardware, software, and other aspects of the development process. So I won’t go to far in depth here, but I wanted to mention a few more details about the visitor experience and the software.

The large size and round form-factor of the multitouch wall should make for an engaging visitor experience. The wall is big enough to accommodate multiple visitors simultaneously.  It also support hundreds of simultaneous touch points.

As I mentioned earlier the exhibit will allow aquarium visitors to “touch” phytoplankton and learn more about them.The fact that microscopic plankton are the base of the marine food web and they produce most of the oxygen present in the Earth’s atmosphere makes the exhibit all the more significant. We hope this installation will provide a compelling way for visitors learn about these important tiny organisms.

The exhibit software was created in Unity 3D and the programming and design was done by Lindsay Digital (they also took the photographs that appear below). This is one of the first projects where we concentrated just on hardware.

Here are a few photographs of the installation at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We will share photos and video of the exhibit in full operation after the opening on July 2nd!

Ideum’s Paul Lacey and Chris Steinmetz work on calibrating the multitouch wall. The number “2560″ which appears on the screen is the resolution of the round multitouch wall. It is 2560 x 2560 pixel which is better than HD resolution.

Paul and Chris are silhouetted in front of the massive multitouch wall.