“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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“The Virtual Museum of Canada must unashamedly create compelling experiences and should experiment with game-like interfaces that are strongly content-based for the born-digital generations.”

This is one of the core conclusions of the Next Generation report (”experience design” chapter) on the future development of the popular Virtual Museum of Canada website.

“PlayWorks” is the title of a new permanent exhibition at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan aimed at children under 5.

“Beneath each image will be a second canvas, a textural and three-dimensional rendering, which a child can touch. And this installation will be just one in a series of interactive exhibits: a huge transparent wall whose surface is for fingerpainting; a climbing structure with hidden dioramas; a sand laboratory with buried “treasures”; a construction area for building gadgets; and, among many other displays, a mechanical baby dragon that will say words when children drop letters into its mouth. The exhibition’s emphasis is not the old saw that learning is fun, but that fun is learning.”

“The idea is that in moments of everyday play children are really getting a tremendous amount of education,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and an adviser to the project. “The significance of play as a foundation for learning is a critically important cultural message.”

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“>Nanoscape by artists and researchers Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau is an invisible sculpture that can be sensed via touch.

Users wear magnetic ring-interfaces and when moving the hand over the table of the installation, strong magnetic forces, repulsion, attraction and even slight shock can be felt.

Wireless magnetic force-feedback interface allows users to touch invisible nano particles, thus creating an changing invisible sculpture which modifies its shape and properties as users interact with it and with each other.

(via we-make-money-not-art)

Lightmodulator is a series of projects by architect Nick Rich which work with light and the phenomena of moments in time where light and the materials it lands on or passes through create magical transformations of space. His initial research has been to understand the sun’s movement and the changing quality of light it gives. Analysis of the sun’s movement can be found on his website portfolio ’sun studies’ and ‘daylight - information from the sky’.

Nick explains “I moved on to experimenting with light modulation through different media. The process of making the media; be it a grid, lense or refractor and observing the effects, puts you in direct contact with light in a similar why to making shadow puppets or playing with your shadow. It is this interaction between us and light which I find interesting and which I’m trying to build into my work.”



(via Interactive Architecture)

This project by Kellee Santiago (founder of thatgamecompany) allows you to control the character using your body. Tilt your arms to turn and raise them to go faster or lower to slow down. It uses the PhaseSpace motion capture set-up, essentially cameras tracking LEDs on the wearers body. It’s great that the player in the photos is wearing a pijama outfit (like the boy in the game) and I think this system would work best in the free flight mode (which is lots of fun). In Cloud though there are many actions, such as pulling the clouds around or absorbing/releasing them, which is hard to build into a motion capture. This game would work perfectly on Wii though, so get in touch Nintendo!

(via pixelsumo)

tabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape and size, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.

The first case of study has been tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach; we are planning to integrate it with GIS products.

(via onTheTableTop)

X-Ray
This installation by All of Us offers visitors an insight into the artist’s thinking behind the painting ‘A view on the Stour near Deadham’ in a fun and engaging process. By walking in front of the projected painting, the visitor casts a virtual shadow over the image, revealing an x-ray of the painting underneath. By comparing the finished painting and the x-ray, the visitor can see alterations in the work that Constable had made during its development. The project uses video camera tracking to create the x-ray shadow, slowly fading between the images allowing the visitor to notice subtle differences between the two.



Grid
All of Us’ second installation, Grid, illustrates Constable’s process of ‘squaring up’ an image in the journey from early sketches to finished work. A replica sketch of ‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows’ is mounted inside an display case, with thread marking out a grid over image (in a similar technique to Constable). The visitor simply touches the glass above the grid to scale up the corresponding section in the full projected painting. The installation reinforces the traditional techniques used by Constable and emphasizes the meticulous accuracy of scale in both his sketch and the final work.

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This installation by All of Us was created for the 18th century Norfolk House Music Room, Plink Plonk used mechanical music boxes as playful delicate input devices, producing their own sound output (the tune ‘You are my sunshine’). A visual narrative responded to the turn of each music box, with each scene containing different reactives. The top photo shows stars glowing around a single music box as it is being turned. The bottom photo shows the end eclipse sequence. Overall it went down really well and had some great feedback.

(via pixelsumo)

London based Sennep created an interactive dandelion for Transvision 2006. Elegantly simple and playful, this installation allowed users to blow away the seeds of a dandelion clock using a real electric hairdryer.

“Blowing it apart is a popular pastime for children. The number of blows required to completely rid the clock of its seeds is deemed to be the time of day.”

(via pixelsumo)

Soundgarten by Michael Wolf is a tangible interface that enables children to record, modify and arrange sound samples in a playful way. Designed as a toy, the garden has 19 plug holes that can fit sounds in the form of mushroom objects. Children can use the pre-defined environmental or musical sounds, or use a wireless microphone to record their own. The three levels of the garden control the sound volume.

Each mushroom object is colour coded and contains an icon to indicate the sound. Effects and filters (echo, resonance, play backwards, increase & decrease) can be applied to sounds using the leaf objects. More than one filter object can be used on each sound, helping the child understand musical and sound principles from an early age.

(via we-make-money-not-art and pixelsumo)

GUI / Graphical User Interface is a re-presentation of the Adobe Photoshop interface within 3-Dimensional space. The illusion is created by using carton, photocopies, glue and sewing thread.

The humorous artwork is made by Joel Swanson who is a digital artist, writer, and researcher investigating the interconnections of literary theory, art, and technology. His work involves the creation of multimedia narratives that exist within digital space (and sometimes within carton space too).

Enis Selmanagic’s playful installation Vps fuck & Tür Stehn im Bild uses light scanners and transfers visitor movements into unique digital pictures and panorama prints. The movements modify prefabricated fragments of video animations and sounds. Each animation fragment represents a different information which can form new knowledge when put in connection to the others.

With the repeating passing of the light scanners, new picture animations are added. A panorama of the screenshots is printed on a 10m roll of glossy photo paper.

Besides, another light sensor controls a shredder. Whenever it is activated, the shredder destroys parts of the printed picture.

(via we-make-money-not-art)

Alexander Wiethoff’s Colour Vision, installed at the Museum of Perception, in Rohrbach (Austria), allows the visitor to change the room colour with the position of his body. Each posture symbolizes a different status like activity, calmness, reflectiveness and is visualized by different colours.

[Alexander Wiethoff is a co-author of this blog]

(via we-make-money-not-art)

The interactive Tintoretto installation by Christian Möller and Marizio Seracini visualises the hidden layers of well-known paintings, using X-ray and infrared technology, for example the preliminary drawings, the priming and any areas which may have been painted over.

This visualisation system appears to the viewer as a virtual replica. It allows the viewer to wipe away each respective foreground by touching the surface of the picture. It is up to the individual to erase their way through the picture layer by layer.

In this way, the observer is able to navigate through the third dimension of the painting and discover a unique image anatomy from an important work of art from the 16th century.

Interactive painting in The Bridge, Museum of Contemporary Art, New Orleans/USA 1996

This interactive light and sound installation by Christian Möller, allows the visitor to control a membrane of light with the frequency of her heartbeat, resulting in an almost overwhelming physical experience.

Interactive light and sound installation at Design Horizonte, Naxos Halle. Frankfurt, 1993.

Gamelan Playtime by Arlete Castelo and Melissa Mongiat draws in passers-by as they walk along Hungerford terrace on the South Bank in London. By moving their hands across a tactile surface pedestrians trigger sensors that release recordings of the Royal Festival Hall’s Gamelan set being played by school children. The sounds are made up of the Gamelan instruments, human voices and song.

(via we-make-money-not-art)

Instant Drawing Machine is a good example of how art+technology can meet the man on the street. Oliver Halsman Rosenberg and Clint Taniguchi, who collaborate under the name Crust and Dirt, draw very playful images following the wishes requested via webcam from passersby in cities across the world.

(via we-make-money-not-art)