Blog
Research Update: Audio/Video Testing
Through the research in Open Exhibits we hope to better understand how visitors interact with multitouch surfaces. Currently, we’re prepping a component of the research where we will audio and video record visitors as they interact with a multitouch table within the museum exhibit. Researchers along with Ideum technical staff recently starting testing the audio/video data collection equipment and protocols at Ideum’s headquarters. There don’t seem to be any major problems in picking up the audio, so up next is an on-site test at one of the partner museums.
We are interested in understanding the interactions that happen at the multitouch surfaces; interactions between the visitor and the multitouch surface, and verbal and gestural interactions between visitors. By analyzing the behavior and dialogue from the videos, we expect to get information that would help us answer the following kinds of questions: How long do visitors stay at the table? How do they physically interact with the table? How long does it take them to adjust to using the table? What are people talking about while they’re at the table, and to whom are they talking?
on Aug 1, 2012 Fall 2012 Conference Round-up
This fall brings three exciting conferences of interest to the Open Exhibits community, and lead Open Exhibits organization Ideum will be participating in each.
The first is ASTC 2012, the Association of Science-Technology Centers conference in Columbus, Ohio on October 13-16. Nearly 2,000 members of the worldwide museum and science center community, including informal science educators and companies collaborating with the museum field, gather for this annual conference. Ideum will be sharing a booth with Open Exhibits at this year’s ASTC, so along with Open Exhibits, we’ll be showing off one of our new multitouch tables (driven, of course, by the Open Exhibits SDK). Please come visit us at booth #709 if you’ll be attending and check out the new gear.
Next up is ACM ITS 2012—Interactive Tabletops & Surfaces—taking place in Cambridge, Massachusetts on November 11-14. Described as “a premiere venue for presenting research in the design and use of new and emerging tabletop and interactive surface technologies,” Open Exhibits Project Coordinator Charles Veasey will be submitting a workshop proposal on Open Exhibits that we hope to have approved and we hope to see you there (please note that ITS workshops occur the day before the conference starts).
Immediately following ACM ITS is the BLUR conference in Broomfield, Colorado on November 15-16. At this conference billed as “the only conference that is exploring the line of interaction between computers and humans in a substantive, real-world and hands-on way,” Ideum’s Jim Spadaccini will be presenting a talk entitled “More Social, More Physical: HCI + Museums.” Jim will be focusing this year on the parallels between traditional exhibit design and new HCI approaches, in addition to examining how HCI technologies are creating a new generation of exhibits and how they are impacting the museum field.
We hope to see some of you Open Exhibits community members at each of these events and encourage you to introduce yourselves if you attend!
on Jul 24, 2012 Open Exhibits - The Road Ahead
Over the next few weeks you will start to see more changes on the Open Exhibits website. There are a few new developments with the project. Charles Veasey is now the Project Coordinator for Open Exhibits and he is busy rebuilding our development team which has two new ActionScript developers! We expect to have some new modules early next month and then new templates and exhibits by early Fall. We will let you know how things progress on that front.
Also, Marshall Macy has joined us and he will play an active role helping with tutorials, forums, and other technical documentation and communications for Open Exhibits. In addition, our Open Exhibits fellow, Shelley Mannion from the British Museum will be joining the team here in New Mexico for the month of August. Shelley will be helping us develop new examples and tutorials. Much more to come.
on Jul 20, 2012 MOPA Launches Soapbox! The Audience Speaks
Last month, the Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA) in San Diego launched its first crowd-curated exhibition entitled Soapbox! The Audience Speaks as Balboa Park’s foray into the growing trend of crowd-sourced curation.
120 images from MOPA’s permanent collection were randomly selected for this exhibition. During the summer voting period visitors to the museum rate each of these images to decide if they should appear in the galleries. As users continue voting, they earn badges. These badges, along with any of the images, can be shared via e-mail. The top 40 images will be displayed as an exhibition that opens in October of this year.
Soapbox! was developed using the Open Exhibits framework on the Flash platform. The application is running on a Samsung SUR40 (formerly known as Microsoft Surface) touch table. The tap and scroll gestures were used in this application for tapping buttons and scrolling through image rankings. The table is also connected to a larger wall-mounted screen where a larger version of the image may be viewed, making the experience both individual and crowd friendly.
If you are in the San Diego area, be sure to drop by Balboa Park to check out MOPA’s Soapbox! exhibit! Users may also cast votes remotely on MOPA’s website!
The mission of the Museum of Photographic Arts is to inspire, educate and engage the broadest possible audience through the presentation, collection, and preservation of photography, film, and video.
on Jul 3, 2012 SDK Update - Version 2.0.6
We are pleased to announce an Open Exhibits SDK update - version 2.0.6. One of the biggest changes is the decoupling of the gesture engine from the rendering engine. You can now independently set the processing rate of the gesture engine. This allows you to optimize your application more effectively.
Other bug fixes and new features include:
- BUG FIX: gesture release event firing early
- BUG FIX: TAP 1 finger gesture unreliable
- BUG FIX: HOLD early firing
- ADDED: processing_rate attribute to GML global params
- BUG FIX: collection viewer off-screen/repopulate algorithm more precise
- CHANGED: onStateEvent has changed from a private method to a protected method of the Component class
- ADDED: over property on ButtonElement class (currently only works for mouse events)
The new release can be downloaded here:
/downloads/sdk/
on Jun 28, 2012 
