Last night, at the American Association of Museums Annual Conference MUSE Awards in Los Angeles, our Electromagnetic Spectrum 100″ Multitouch Table Exhibit, developed with Adventure Science Center, won a bronze AAM MUSE award in the Interactive Kiosk category. We are honored to have been selected. Congratulations to the Adventure Science Center team and congrats to all of the MUSE Award winners.
Below is a video of the exhibit which we released last fall. I wrote a case study about the EM Spectrum exhibit that is available on the ExhibitFiles website; see “Space Imaging Multitouch Multiuser.”
We played a small part in the opening, as both the Art and History galleries have exhibits that run on our multitouch tables. We worked with Oakland Museum to design and develop software for the California Land Grab exhibit found in the History gallery. This multitouch and multiuser exhibit allows visitors to view high-resolution historical maps of California and other documents. This application was developed with our own GestureWorks framework for Adobe Flash. Below are some photographs of the California Land Grab exhibit. There are more photographs of this exhibit and our multitouch tables on the Ideum Flickr stream.
A lot of newspaper articles covered the weekend opening, you can find a complete listing on the Oakland Museum website. One article in particular that caught my attention was in the Contra Costa Times, who published a map of the new galleries with descriptions and photos showing exhibits of interest. Check out Oakland Museum, 2.0 The Layout to get an overview of the new galleries.
I went out this weekend to the newly renovated Oakland Museum of California (OMCA). Each of three disciplines (art, history and natural sciences) occupies its own floor, and the exhibit space for each is currently undergoing extensive remodeling. The art and history galleries are set to open in May, and both sections now feature a custom MT-50 multitouch table.
The history table has custom rust-colored panels, which look great with the antique California maps, gold rush-era artifacts and wood panelling that surrounds it. The history table will feature a custom mapping application, built using Flash and GestureWorks, that will allow visitors to explore points of interest in California–centered on a historical map–and magnify them using a component built specially for the app.
The art table is currently in a section of the gallery that features folk and outsider art. With its sleek white panels, it fits right in, and Stamen Design is creating a custom application for the table that allows visitors to further explore California artists. Rather than go with the standard art gallery neutrals, OMCA has chosen to paint certain walls throughout the gallery vivid colors (you can see that golden wall in the image above), and the effect is really striking.
The museum opening is May 1st -2nd. If you’re in the Bay Area, you should definitely come check out the museum’s amazing remodel for yourself!
The new Imaginarium Discovery Center at the Anchorage Museum is set to open May 22nd, and one of our exhibit technicians, Chris, was lucky enough to get a sneak peek when he went up this past weekend to install a MT-50 Multitouch Table.
The new Imaginarium has over 9,000 feet of exhibit space, with several galleries focusing on different scientific disciplines. The MT-50 will be part of the Earth and Life Sciences gallery. Designed in conjunction with Ansel Associates, the gallery will feature touch tanks, an aquarium and even alligators. Reptiles can’t survive in tundra climates, so for some native Alaskans, the gallery displays could be their first reptile sighting ever!
The MT-50 features a custom multitouch multiuser exhibit, designed by the Imaginarium & Ideum using Adobe Flash and GestureWorks, that allows visitors to compare and contrast two different species of animal by dragging their pictures into a spherical information interface in the center. Many of the animals in the virtual table exhibit will be featured in the live animal exhibits or can be seen in Alaska wilderness areas, allowing visitors to learn more about animals they can actually observe.
Last week, our senior multitouch engineer braved the 25-hour flight to Malaysia to install a MT-50 Multitouch Table in the Petronas Towers, the tallest twin buildings in the world. Our table is in the lobby of Petrosains, the science and discovery center on the 4th & 5th levels of both towers.
The center is huge, with over 70,000 sq. ft of exhibit space(!), and features several implementations of multitouch technologies. The screens that can be seen behind the MT-50 in the photo below are also multitouch, as are the kiosks and touch voting screens in the background. The “Hot Science” gallery is designed to promote interest in the latest cutting-edge scientific research. Although the center focuses on petroleum-related technologies (the towers are home to Petronas, Malaysia’s national oil and gas company), it has a wide variety of other science exhibits as well.
It seemed like everyone got a kick out of the programs on the table. Staff and visitors alike enjoyed playing Gravitoy, a multitouch physics-based game (NUITEQ) that allows you to change the way objects slide on the table. All of the Petrosains staff were extremely welcoming and helpful. Check out our flickr set to see more images from the Petrosians install.
It’s been a busy week for the GestureWorks team. Our programmers have been developing a Flex-compatible version of GestureWorks, which we expect to release later this month. (We already provide the easiest way to author multitouch with Adobe Flash.) Be the first to know about our Flex release; follow GestureWorks on Twitter and Facebook.
We’ve posted some great new tutorials on creating applications with the flick & zoom gestures, as well as a more complex tutorial on implementing rotate, zoom & drag on multiple objects. Hopefully these tutorials will aid new developers as well as developers new to GestureWorks in easily creating multitouch applications in Flash.
We are now offering educational pricing for developers and teachers in both institutional and informal learning environments. Museum folk, that means educational pricing is available for you too! The standard version of GestureWorks, which allows distribution on up to 5 machines, is $99, while a site license is $399. Use the coupon code “edu50” at checkout before April 15th to save an additional $50 dollars on your new copy of GestureWorks!
So how tough is the MT-50 multitouch table? Just last week, we tried to find out. We conducted a few tests to see how the glass surface of the table in particular would hold up to some serious abuse. First, we dropped a 12-pound bowling ball onto the table from a height of 2 feet, then we hit the table hard with a 4-pound hammer. Not only did the tempered glass surface survive, it showed no marks from these impacts.
As you can see, we had a lot of fun with this, but durability is a serious concern for tables that are deployed in public spaces. The MT-50 is not only the fastest table out there (with 60 points of simultaneous input), but now we can also safely say it is the toughest. Don’t try to drop a bowling ball on a Microsoft Surface!
Update: March 5, 2010 – The story about the improved MT-50 has gotten around this week with stories in Engadget, Slashgear, Electronista, and dozens of other blogs.
The ExhibitFiles Website is a community site for exhibit designers and developers. Almost three years ago now, Ideum worked with the Association of Science -Technology Centers and Independent Exhibitions to help design and develop the site. Created with funding from the National Science Foundation, the purpose of the site is share design practices and provide access to resources that can improve exhibit design. Last week, we launched a new feature called “Bits,” which best described on the ExhibitFiles site itself:
A Bit is an individual media element that you share with your peers. It might be a photo you take of an inspiring exhibit element or design approach, or it could be a prototype you’d like people to comment on — anything you can illustrate with a photo, video, or audio file. You can also just post a question if you’re looking for help from others.
Along with support for uploaded files, you can embed flickr photos or YouTube videos. We will be adding support for PDF documents and audio files in coming weeks. The custom-developed Bits feature and the site itself was developed using Ruby on Rails.
For the second year in a row, Paul Lacey and I will be hosting a workshop entitled Make it Multitouch at the Museums and the Web conference. Normally, I try to avoid sequels and over the last few years I have delivered one-time workshops on RSS, mashups, and even online video editing. Multitouch is different. As emergent technology, it has the potential to fundamentally change the way visitors interactive with exhibits and eventually the Web itself.
This year Paul and I will have a few new things to share. Most notably, we will show a new experimental LCD multitouch table table (a potential successor to the MT-5o multitouch table) and provide a peek under the hood of this new high-resolution device. I hope to see some of you at the Museums and the Web conference this year in Denver. The workshop will be held on April 14th. Here’s the description…
Multitouch and multiuser exhibits are changing the ways in which visitors interact with computer-based exhibits in museums. 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. The iPhone and other touch-enabled phones, the popularity of multitouch-capable all-in-one PCs, and the release of Windows 7 demonstrate the reach of multitouch technology. This major technological change presents exhibit developers with new and exciting design challenges. Before long, the work of Web developers will be impacted by the advent of multitouch, as well.
In this full-day workshop, we’ll explore a variety of multitouch technologies including off-the-shelf multitouch-enabled PCs, along with a look under the hood our second-generation custom-built 50″ touch table. We’ll also explain the software development process. Participants will see a variety of examples and prototypes, including many that use Web-based technologies. 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.
Finally, we’ll explore the design challenges multitouch and multiuser exhibits present. We’ll examine some traditional computer-based exhibits and conceptualize how they might be designed differently with multitouch and collaborative capabilities in mind. Through engaging rapid-design exercises, we’ll explore and discuss the conceptual, informational, and user-interface aspects of multitouch and multiuser design.
Today, I posted a case study about this exhibit on the ExhibitFiles website, under Space Imaging: Multitouch Multiuser Exhibit. In addition, we’ve decide to post a couple of pictures showing the inside of our 100″ multitouch table on the Ideum Flickr page. Hopefully, these new posts will help explain more about how the exhibit was developed.
As you can see from these pictures, we used infrared LEDs and a dual computer and projector system to create our optical sensing system. Find more about the inner workings of the table on our Flickr site by clicking the photos above. What isn’t shown is the exhibit software, which was developed in Adobe Flash and uses our GestureWorks multitouch framework for Flash. You can learn more about that on the GestureWorks site.
