Emerging Technologies
Kevin Walker begins his presentation...
He begins by introducing himself, and the London Knowledge Lab, where he works.
Generally he says, people have put computers into museums in order to fit in a load of content that curators couldn't otherwise fit into the exhibition. What he's been interested in, he says, is computers that relate to the physical world.
He gets out some toys from his bag. The first is a tilt sensor, which he put under a table in an exhibit, so that people tilted the table to affect a projection onto the table, making for an intuitive exhibit.
He goes on to tell the story of Shackleton, who took a ship full of people to try and reach the south pole. He shoes a video of a 3D-rendered footage of the boat crashing into the ice, suggesting that this is something you wouldn't otherwise be able to show. The exhibition was primarily an exhibition of photographs, he says, except for one object which was a little boat that the six guys travelled the ocean in. He wanted to show this amazing story, he says, and so they stuck the boat in the middle of the gallery and surrounded it with video projects of the ocean. This made people feel a bit sea sick, but was successful in immersing people in the exhibit. They recreated the oceon in 3D. They then hooked up a sextant with a computer, so that you could look through the sextant and take a sighting, and then a screen calculates your position, and tells you how far off course you were. It was intended to be quite difficult, to show how challenging the conditions and experience was.
He gets out another gadget, which is a very simple button/knob. He plugs it in, and shows how turning the knob changes a display. Not particularly a future technology he says, but he used to have to solder together these gadgets whilst today you can buy them commercially.
He gets out a video camera, which plugs into his apple laptop. The first demonstration shows that it can track your movements. Whilst he used to have to program this software, it now comes built in to every 50 pound webcam.
He shows how the video tracking technology was used to build a 'virtual dig', to solve the problem of real digs being dirty and requiring supervision and so on.
He shows a product from Sony which you can stick on to anything to make it into a touch sensitive surface.
Next is an exhibit called thin air, where there is a projection into thin air, which people can control by pointing at and moving thier hands about.
Next up he shows a video project of the earth from space, and talks about how HD TV is being talked up in shops at the moment. There's an argument that it won't take off however, as people are also interested in web delivery of content and so on. Museums however are a place where high definition projects might work though, as it's giving people an experience they might not otherwise get at home.
He shows a video of two dinosaurs fighting, which was projected in an exhibition to help explain a fossil of two dinosaurs which had been found in a fighting position with each other.
He says he's big of projectors, and has spent time trying to get rid of screens within museums, because projection can transform a physical space, changing a wall that it's projected onto. He shows a video of a projection onto a white model, where the project knows the shape of the thing it's projecting on to. Another video he shows is where there's a series of white walls where a load of projectors turn the walls into different physical spaces.
He goes on to talk about electronic paper, which some newspapers are now trialling. Unlike screens, he says, electronic paper is reflective rather than projecting light, which tends to attract and distract people.
He shows another video of a wooden mirror, in which lots of small bits of wood are rotated to change their reflective properties in time with a video camera capturing the person looking at it, creating the illusion of a mirror.
He talks about a new Planetarium called the Rose Centre for Earth and Space. The big spherical surface was used to explain size information, such as models demonstrating the size of the planets relative to the Sun.
He skips through lots of other interesting examples of technology within visitor attractions. There's so much information here, I can't type fast enough to keep up!
A final video is of the National Cowgirl Museum in texas (!!). You ride a model horse for a few seconds, and then videos and motion sensors take your image and superimposes them onto an old-style rodeo video. You also get a username and password with which you can download the video from the web.
Question: Someone asks how you can plan these technology based exhibits to enable learning. He says that much of the work he's done has been trial and error. Whilst he's used evaluation and learning theory from the beginning, but often it's difficult to know how the interactives will work until they've actually been used by people.
He begins by introducing himself, and the London Knowledge Lab, where he works.
Generally he says, people have put computers into museums in order to fit in a load of content that curators couldn't otherwise fit into the exhibition. What he's been interested in, he says, is computers that relate to the physical world.
He gets out some toys from his bag. The first is a tilt sensor, which he put under a table in an exhibit, so that people tilted the table to affect a projection onto the table, making for an intuitive exhibit.
He goes on to tell the story of Shackleton, who took a ship full of people to try and reach the south pole. He shoes a video of a 3D-rendered footage of the boat crashing into the ice, suggesting that this is something you wouldn't otherwise be able to show. The exhibition was primarily an exhibition of photographs, he says, except for one object which was a little boat that the six guys travelled the ocean in. He wanted to show this amazing story, he says, and so they stuck the boat in the middle of the gallery and surrounded it with video projects of the ocean. This made people feel a bit sea sick, but was successful in immersing people in the exhibit. They recreated the oceon in 3D. They then hooked up a sextant with a computer, so that you could look through the sextant and take a sighting, and then a screen calculates your position, and tells you how far off course you were. It was intended to be quite difficult, to show how challenging the conditions and experience was.
He gets out another gadget, which is a very simple button/knob. He plugs it in, and shows how turning the knob changes a display. Not particularly a future technology he says, but he used to have to solder together these gadgets whilst today you can buy them commercially.
He gets out a video camera, which plugs into his apple laptop. The first demonstration shows that it can track your movements. Whilst he used to have to program this software, it now comes built in to every 50 pound webcam.
He shows how the video tracking technology was used to build a 'virtual dig', to solve the problem of real digs being dirty and requiring supervision and so on.
He shows a product from Sony which you can stick on to anything to make it into a touch sensitive surface.
Next is an exhibit called thin air, where there is a projection into thin air, which people can control by pointing at and moving thier hands about.
Next up he shows a video project of the earth from space, and talks about how HD TV is being talked up in shops at the moment. There's an argument that it won't take off however, as people are also interested in web delivery of content and so on. Museums however are a place where high definition projects might work though, as it's giving people an experience they might not otherwise get at home.
He shows a video of two dinosaurs fighting, which was projected in an exhibition to help explain a fossil of two dinosaurs which had been found in a fighting position with each other.
He says he's big of projectors, and has spent time trying to get rid of screens within museums, because projection can transform a physical space, changing a wall that it's projected onto. He shows a video of a projection onto a white model, where the project knows the shape of the thing it's projecting on to. Another video he shows is where there's a series of white walls where a load of projectors turn the walls into different physical spaces.
He goes on to talk about electronic paper, which some newspapers are now trialling. Unlike screens, he says, electronic paper is reflective rather than projecting light, which tends to attract and distract people.
He shows another video of a wooden mirror, in which lots of small bits of wood are rotated to change their reflective properties in time with a video camera capturing the person looking at it, creating the illusion of a mirror.
He talks about a new Planetarium called the Rose Centre for Earth and Space. The big spherical surface was used to explain size information, such as models demonstrating the size of the planets relative to the Sun.
He skips through lots of other interesting examples of technology within visitor attractions. There's so much information here, I can't type fast enough to keep up!
A final video is of the National Cowgirl Museum in texas (!!). You ride a model horse for a few seconds, and then videos and motion sensors take your image and superimposes them onto an old-style rodeo video. You also get a username and password with which you can download the video from the web.
Question: Someone asks how you can plan these technology based exhibits to enable learning. He says that much of the work he's done has been trial and error. Whilst he's used evaluation and learning theory from the beginning, but often it's difficult to know how the interactives will work until they've actually been used by people.
posted by Frankie Roberto at
10:31 AM
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