At Artissima, the international fair of contemporary art in Torino, visitors are able to use simple hand and arm gestures to browse a visual catalogue of recent art work exhibited at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, an important museum in the city.

The technology is based on sophisticated gesture recognition, while the end-result for the visitor is a radically simple content navigation system in which the images are projected on a large screen, and interaction is performed via nothing but a flat luminous surface.

The project was developed by Jan-Christoph Zoels, Yaniv Steiner and Ofer Luft of Experientia, an international experience design consultancy based in Torino.

A prototype of the gesture-based interface was previously used to navigate Google Earth and to guide club dancing during a music rave. The various interfaces are all based on the smartRetina™ technology, which provides the designer with a programmable “eye”, allowing him to easily design new experiences and interactions which do not require a tangible interface.

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“In their efforts to compete with other and more dynamic providers of information and entertainment, many museums are listening to their visitors more closely than ever before,” writes Jennifer Kabat in a long story on the website of the Adobe Design Center.

“In some cases museums—famously top-down institutions—are even incorporating the views, critical choices and contributed content of visitors into their programs. They are also re-examining the ways in which visitors interact with objects and spaces, as well as each other. For help with both of these approaches they are turning to a growing sector of the interactive design world; one that specializes in interactive museum displays.”

“Thus, the best interactive exhibits are open-ended. They encourage visitors to be active participants in the experience rather than passive consumers of information. They take their visitors’ views seriously and break down the hierarchy of institutions.”

Acknowledging the debate (”The idea of the audience taking control sends shivers down many a curator’s spine”), Kabat provides some very good examples of thoughtful integration of user-generated content in museum and exhibition contexts.

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Books are great tools to aiding learning and imagination, but is it possible to use technology in such a way that children might actually experience something like the African savannah for themselves? Savannah, a strategy-based adventure game mapping a virtual space onto a real one, was developed with just such an ambitious aim.

The understanding that game- and role-play can be effective educational tools has long been accepted, but in coming up with the idea of Savannah, a game in which a virtual space (the African savannah) would be mapped onto a real space (a Bristol school’s playing field), research and development organisation Futurelab aimed to take the concept to new levels, ones that would incorporate a number of new and unproven objectives.

As Jo Morrison, creative director at Futurelab explains: ‘We were very interested in whether the appealing and motivating aspects of computer gameplay could be harnessed and transposed into a mixed reality experience. The initial concept was developed in-house, then conversations took place with the BBC’s Natural History Unit and staff at Hewlett Packard working on the Mobile Bristol Initiative to see if they were interested in developing the notion of an augmented reality game where children collaborated when role-playing lions in a savannah.’

In the game, children move around a real space with GPS-linked PDAs, pretending to be a pride of lions which has to survive a year in the savannah. As they move around, the children/lions encounter hotspots where they can smell, hear and see objects (prey, predators etc) on their screens, and the computers link them to each other so that they can work together and communicate information both to each other and to an interactive whiteboard in ‘the den’ which monitors their progress.

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