We’ve been mighty busy around here with the Open Exhibits initial software release and site relaunch just around the corner (coming November 15), but we have found time for other important and related work.

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.

I’ve just read Shelley Bernstein’s response to the NY Times “From Picassos to Sarcophagi, Guided by Phone Apps” article over on the Brooklyn Museum blog and she brings up some great points about the use of emergent technology and experimentation.

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.

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.

Of course, I will also demonstrate Open Exhibits now that we are funded and underway.

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.

>>Reposted from Open Exhibits Blog

It’s official!  Ideum has been awarded a major ($1.78M) National Science Foundation grant for a three-year exhibit software initiative entitled Open Exhibits.  The project will release a suite of open source multitouch-enabled exhibit modules and templates with the goal of transforming the way in which museum professionals and other informal educators assemble interactive computer-based exhibits for use in museums.

Later this fall, we will release Open Exhibits Core software, which includes support for multitouch gestures within Adobe Flash and Flex. This software will be free for museums, nonprofits, universities, students, and other educational organizations.

Along with the core, the first open source templates and modules will also be released. These templates and modules will allow developers to easily create interactive exhibits. We will provide more specifics as we get closer to the release date. As the project progresses, we hope to see community members create and share their own modules and templates.

Open Exhibits Core is based on the commercial GestureWorks software package.

All open source modules and templates will work with both Open Exhibits Core and the GestureWorks multitouch framework for Flash and Flex.

All of the software will be available on the Open Exhibits site. In addition, the site will become a resource for developers, with screencasts, tutorials, documentation, research findings, forums, and the software itself.  A major update of the Open Exhibits site is already in the works.

Ideum is the lead organization on Open Exhibits. I am the Principal Investigator of the project and Kate Haley Goldman is the co-PI and main researcher for the project. We have three museum partners: the Don Harrington Discovery Center, the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. Evaluation will be conducted by Rockman et. al.

To learn more, visit the Open Exhibits website. We encourage you to join our mailing list and follow us on Twitter or on Facebook. We will be announcing software release dates and other news in the next couple of weeks.

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.”

This weekend was Oakland Museum’s non-stop, 31 hour opening celebration. I was lucky enough to get a preview on Thursday and it is an impressive redesign effort. The Gallery of California History and the Gallery of California Art have been thoroughly reinvented. The Gallery of California Natural Sciences opens in the Fall of 2012.

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 22^nd, 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!