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.

The Presenter is easy to install and maintain, virtually indestructible, and works in practically any ambient lighting environment. The integrated touch sensor supports up to 32 simultaneous touch points for multiple user exhibits. The 4” thin Presenter is protected by hardened 3mm tempered glass and a vandal-proof metal housing.

The Presenter features a 65” 3D LCD display with full HD resolution and flicker-free FPR 3D imaging that uses an LED backlight rated for 50,000 hours. The massive interactive display is over 2.5 times larger than the Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface 2.

The powerful built-in computer features an Intel® Core™ i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, Solid State Hard Drive, and a discrete GPU, making the Presenter more than three times faster than the Surface 2.0, and likely to outperform any other touchscreen on the market.

The MT65 Presenter includes built-in WIFI, Bluetooth, and Ethernet connectivity. It also features stereo speakers, an external HD webcam with Carl Zeiss® optics and a stereo microphone. The Presenter has HDMI input/output that allows you to easily mirror the device’s display, or it can receive input from another device.

An optional locking plate secures the Presenter’s Ethernet, HDMI, 3.5mm Audio in/out, and USB 2.0 ports against unwanted access. Similar to Ideum’s MT55 Series of multitouch tables, the Presenter features single-button operation. Just plug it in and turn it on.

Every MT65 Presenter ships with a full, lifetime, licensed copy of GestureWorks 3 for ActionScript. GestureWorks® for ActionScript provides streamlined multitouch authoring for multitouch walls, tables, desktops, tablets, and embedded devices. You’ll save precious development time and have access to pre-built gestures and the world’s first markup language for multitouch: GestureML. In addition, GestureWorks®  SDK has a powerful touch point cluster analysis system, a built-in simulator, and includes access to pre-built modules.

For more information, please download and read the MT65 Presenter Press Release.

MT65 Presenter Press Release
(Updated: 01-17-12) (49kb)

You can also read about the MT65 Presenter on Engadget

We’d love to program every computer-based exhibit that comes our way, but we don’t always have the capacity. In those situations, our partners are an integral component to the success of the MT55 multitouch table, and the satisfaction of our clients.

If you are searching for a firm to design and develop your next multi-touch application or interactive exhibit, we highly recommend contacting one of our partners. To view a list of our partners, and recent installations please visit our Partner Page.

Interested in becoming a partner? The Ideum Developer Partner Program allows you to offer your clients the best multitouch tables available with exclusive hardware discounts, free software, marketing opportunities and other benefits. If you would like to apply, please contact us.

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.

The tables were included as part of the Reuse Cafe. The exhibit invites visitors to reconfigure discarded objects into fun new projects. Here is a video showing off the unique application designed by Greg Roberts for our partner Black Rocket Interactive.

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.

The multitouch table is a fully integrated, hardened system and it includes an integrated HP computer with a three-year warranty. It has single button operation, integrated power and cooling, a UPS back-up system, controllable LED under-lighting, and even a Bose audio system. The table also comes with the GestureWorks multitouch SDK. (You can see the full specifications on our MT55 HD product page.)

Last week, we unveiled the MT55 HD at the Museums and the Web conference in Philadelphia. We are now preparing for the American Association of Museums (AAM) conference and we have designed an ad for the conference program. Here’s a sneak peak of the full-page MT55 HD advertisement:

This week we are working on a polished promotional video that will show off all the features of the MT55 HD. Right now, we have a short video of the MT55 HD in action and a few photographs on our Flickr site (see the MT55 HD Multitouch Table set). Watch for our promotional video, we’ll be posting it very soon.

In March of 2006, we conducted a survey of museum blogs and community sites and found 26 sites, most of them begun within a few months of the survey. Blogging in the museum world was so new that the LA Times did a story on museum blogs that summer. In 2007, we conducted a follow up survey and I co-authored a paper for Museums and the Web with Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum. We found 111 museum blogs. In 2008, we stopped counting.

Blogging and the next wave of social media are now commonplace and today most museums use these technologies in one way or another.  Back in 2006, it required “Radical Trust” for museums to get involved with social media.

Since 2006, Ideum has undergone some major changes too. When I wrote that first blog post, we had just moved to New Mexico, we had four employees and most of the work we did was focused around Web development. We still do Web development today, but we are also involved in a number of other pursuits.

We develop many more exhibits for the floor than we did back in 2006. We’ve created mobile applications for the iPhone and we are working on one for Android right now. We’ve released GestureWorks, a commercial multitouch software package, and we have a line of hardware products too. We are involved in a number of government-sponsored educational projects; we’re currently working with both NASA and NOAA and running the Open Exhibits project, which started just last September and is supported by NSF.  From radical trust to radical change.

Thanks for reading.

We’ve just posted a call for participation in our third annual Computer-Based Exhibits in Museum Survey on the Open Exhibits Website.  We’ve managed to have over 250 respondents to the last two surveys, representing hundreds of museums all over the world. You can see the previous survey results on the Open Exhibits website. We plan to release the survey results in early December. Those who complete the survey will be able to see the results first.

Also, earlier in the week, we released an alpha build of Open API, a program that allows developers to create a public API of a collection or any other MySQL database. This is not to be confused with the larger release of Open Exhibits core in November, which is a multitouch-enabled Flash and Flex-based software (Open API is built using Ruby), but we do plan on releasing other types of software modules that can help museums develop computer-based exhibits. At the moment, only a handful of museums have open APIs for their collections.

You can read the full post on Open API on the Open Exhibits blog.

Edward Rothstein at the Times didn’t seem to be too impressed by any of the apps he tried, and from a contextual or information standpoint, he may have a point. If you are looking for an extended, interactive version of the wall plaques that detail the artist’s life, history, and context, these apps may fall short. But in our work designing interactive exhibits, we’ve found that it is the social component that can make or break an exhibit, and the Brooklyn Museum is pushing how mobile technologies connect people through the art they’re viewing as well as inform them about that art.

If used well, these new technologies can change the museum from a place where people connect with exhibits in solitude (audio tour headphones on, reading quietly to themselves, or quietly tapping a single computer screen) to a place where people are able to actively connect, recommend and participate with other visitors and the exhibit. Enabling a “like” or similar feature, as the Brooklyn Museum has done, allows visitors to connect long after they leave the museum floor. And such connections aren’t just wishful thinking; as Ms. Bernstein points out, the app statistics show that people are actually using the Like feature to find and recommend objects to other visitors.

Such connections may add to the “scarcely literate cybergraffiti” for Mr. Rothstein, but to us, they’re what make facebook, twitter, and a new crop of interactive museum technologies exciting: the ability to share with and learn from people you know personally and the opportunity to forge new personal connections over shared exhibit interests.

Of course there’s always room to grow, especially when working with new and largely untried technologies. Even if the concept is perfect, technological, networking, and financial limitations often frustrate the creation of that ur-application or exhibit. The perfect museum app might well act as Wikipedia, Share This!, FourSquare and a brilliant curator all in one. But we’d like to give a thumbs up to the Brooklyn Museum for having the guts to experiment with these technologies in a thoughtful and interesting way.