The MuseumExpo opening event begins on Monday, May 20th at noon.

Jim Spadaccini, Ideum’s CEO & Creative Director, will present in the Annual Meeting session titled Learning Together: Developing Multi-User Interactives on Tuesday, May 21st at 8:45 a.m.  Fellow presenters include Aaron Miller of Bluecadet, Marie Georg of the Field Museum, and moderator Josh Goldblum of Bluecadet.

Included as part of this release is a new feature that you may like to explore: the CML Sound tag. The Sound tag allows you to attach sounds in the form of mp3 audio files directly to display objects. Using the sound tag’s trigger attribute, you can assign gestures and interactions as the interaction which triggers sound. In later releases we’ll provide a similar system for GML sound tags. Using the new Sound tag is as easy as this:

We’ve posted a couple of new tutorials on the Gestureworks Flash Wiki (remember Gestureworks Flash is the commercial version of the Open Exhibits SDK).  We’ve fulfilled a long-standing request for a tutorial on CML component and element building in ActionScript.

We’ve also published a tutorial to help you get started with the Leap Motion as an input device.

Check out the release notes for a full description of changes.
Download the Open Exhibits SDK 2.6.1.

General guidelines to know:

The Center for Universal Design “is a national information, technical assistance, and research center that evaluates, develops, and promotes accessible and universal design in housing, commercial and public facilities, outdoor environments, and products.” In particular, one of the invaluable resources that they have created is a downloadable poster that explains and illustrates the Principles of Universal Design.

CAST, “a nonprofit research and development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals through Universal Design for Learning,” has also created indispensable go-to materials for thinking about museum accessibility. Among the host of resources devoted to Universal Design for Learning, CAST has created guidelines, videos, and presentations. All of them can be found here.

The DO-IT Center “promotes the success of individuals with disabilities in postsecondary education and careers, using technology as an empowering tool,” and their website features numerous resources. Some are specifically geared to students with disabilities while others are for educators and employers. One of our favorite videos produced by DO-IT features how to make websites accessible.

A project called Universal Design Education involving The Center for Universal Design, IDEA Center in the School of Architecture and Planning, and the Global Universal Design Educator’s Network has created a unique website dedicated to “support[ing] educators and students in their teaching and study of universal design.” Be sure to check out the extensive links and bibliographies and join one of the conversations on the Discussion Forums.

We also wanted to draw your attention to the US Census data on the number of people with disabilities. You can find the latest information in this summary report.

Museum specific resources to explore:

Through the Office for Accessibility, the National Endowment for the Arts highlights its work to “make the arts accessible for people with disabilities, older adults, veterans, and people living in institutions.” One of the publications showcased on the website is the Design for Accessibility: A Cultural Administrator’s Handbook.  This resource, which suggests practical steps you can take to make your organization more inclusive, has an online companion that is available here.

The Association of Science-Technology Centers devotes part of its website to information for museum professionals about Accessible Practices. This site is a collection of key resources including legal guidelines, background information about the Disability Rights Movement, checklists and advice on how to choose access advisors.

The American Alliance of Museums has also published references for the museum field on how to make institutions more accessible to all. One particularly significant publication, Everyone’s Welcome, helps professionals become familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and learn ways to incorporate recommendations into their work. You can purchase this book directly from their site.

And finally, The British Museum’s website provides an example of how museums can make their online collections more accessible by including both British Sign Language videos and audio descriptions of objects in their collection. Discover these objects and more here.

CollectiveAccess is web-based software for managing museum and archival collections. It is the first collection management system used with the Collection Viewer as proof of concept for making interactive multitouch exhibits with existing datasets. Open Exhibits created an artificial collection of objects within CollectiveAccess using images from the Encyclopedia of Life Images Group on Flickr and descriptive text from various web sources. The Collection Viewer mapped to the ‘Organism Type’, ‘Organism Subtype’, and ‘Organism Location’ fields in the object records to create a primary browsing category and two narrower sub-categories. The ‘Physical Description’ field was used to populate the image description.

The Collection Viewer interface features two browsing docks where visitors can select categories and sub-categories for image browsing. Based on pre-mapped category terms, relevant images will appear in the dock and are available to be dragged into the main viewing area. Once in the viewing space, images can be enlarged, rotated, and shared. Description information for each image is viewable by tapping on the information icon on the bottom left corner of each image.

This version of the Collection Viewer will be released in the upcoming weeks. Open Exhibits will be demonstrating the Collection Viewer this week Museums and the Web on Ideum’s prototype of the Platform 46 3M multitouch table.

The Collection Viewer for use with Flickr photo sets is available for download. For more information and to download, see this Downloads page.

]]> http://openexhibits.org/accessibility/collection-viewer-paired-with-collectiveaccess/7901/feed/ 0 http://openexhibits.org/community/open-exhibits-sdk-2-6/7856/ http://openexhibits.org/community/open-exhibits-sdk-2-6/7856/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:10:06 +0000 Charles Veasey http://openexhibits.org/?p=7856 Continue reading →]]> We’re pleased to announce a major release for the Open Exhibits SDK – version 2.6. This release is packed with new components, features, and bug fixes. We’ve made it possible to connect the gesture analysis engine to just about any device. As proof we’ve integrated the Leap Motion Controller and provided support for the Starling Framework. Now you can use any input configuration. For example you can configure the Leap Motion Controller to rotate a 3D model and configure the touch screen to select menu options.

New Features:

• 2D Leap integration
• Starling support
• TweenMax integration
• Database-driven rendering
• New and improved CML expression attributes, selectors, and template renderers
• Open GML binding infrastructure allows use of any framework or input type
• New and improved UI elements and components including: Accordion, Model3D, Drawer, Dock, FlickrQuery, Hotspot, ProgressBar, SlideshowViewer, ScrollPane, and ScrollBar.

Check out the release notes for a full description of the features in Open Exhibits 2.6. Learn more about the Leap Motion Controller.

Notice the light and dark version of these UI elements. We are trying to make this set of UI elements as universally adaptable as possible. Our UI elements can all be re-skinned, but having a more attractive starting point (these will be our “default” components) would be a step forward. Along with improved visual design, we’ve been reworking some of the functionality of these elements to make them more user friendly–there is still a bit of work remaining.  You can see more of these designs on the Open Exhibits Flickr site. Let us know what you think.

The DUO is the world’s first and only DIY 3D sensing solution. The DUO comes in many forms: with open hardware plans, molded cases, kits and fully assembled devices. All paired with an open source Driver, SDK and examples. Resulting in a professional grade solution for 3D sensing using stereo vision. The best part is it’s extremely easy to use, just plug it in, download the software and you can start playing within minutes. If you can wave in the air you can use a DUO.

What could be as cool as a multitouch screen? Multitouch without a screen. As multitouch moves into the third dimension, so does Open Exhibits. Our team is working on developing a library of 3D motion gestures and adding support for 3D motion sensing and other new HCI technologies. Integrating the DUO is on the roadmap. The DUO provides a DIY solution that museum techs should be keeping an eye on.

Help the DUO become a reality with their Kickstarter campaign.

The exhibit  includes retractable control stations, referred to as docks that guide users through query construction by vertically spinning a set of dials populated with predefined search terms. Each dial change submits a new query, as a combination of aligned dial terms, and generates a visual result set representation in the dock. Result sets can be horizontally scrolled and images can be loaded to stage by either tapping a result or dragging a result to one of the graphical placeholders. Once on stage, users can transform images with basic manipulation gestures, close images, and flip to info panels to view descriptions.

The exhibit is fully configured in CML and CSS to support easy customization of features like search term assignment, placeholder layout, number of query dials, text field attributes, etc. The accompanying documentation provides instruction on how to link your own Flickr sets and how to change the exhibit’s style.

The exhibit, by default, uses the Women in Science Flickr set from the Smithsonian Institute.

Download the exhibit.

Museums and the Web in Portland, April 17-20. In addition to an exhibit booth, we will be doing a workshop on Open Exhibits, our free multitouch software for museums and educational institutions. The workshop will present exciting new developments for version 3.0 of the OE framework. Among else, we’ll be exploring the new database driven Collection Viewer and Leap Motion integration.

American Alliance of Museums in Baltimore, May 19-22. Come see us at Booth #501 right near the entrance to the exhibit hall. We will demo the latest Open Exhibits software. In addition, Ideum’s Jim Spadaccini will be one of the presenters for a session: Learning Together: Developing Multi-User Interactives. That session will be held, bright and early at 8:45AM on Tuesday May 21st.

To both conferences, Ideum will be bringing its latest prototype 3M 46″ Platform Multitouch Table which debuted at Digital Signage Expo (DSE) in February and then went on to hit South-by-Southwest (SXSW) earlier this month. Come check it out yourself.

The CMME workshops were a designed to help give individuals and ISE institutions the tools to make concrete changes in museum multimedia design practices.

To start institutions down the path of Universal Design, is a workshop like CMME (multi-institution, but hosted by one) the best route to go?

Knowing that exhibition design is not only “messy” in the words of one of the participants, but a process sometimes lasting years, how should an institution incorporate the elements of the CMME workshop within their overall design process?

Is there a mini-version of the workshop (a shortened version now that some shared universal design expertise and vocabulary has been developed) that could goes forward to create other needed universally designed elements for the Hall of Human Life or other exhibits?

During the workshop, one of the participants mentioned that this was somewhat backwards from the typical exhibit design process. Customarily, content is central. A museum first brings together all the content, and then tries to design creative strategies for engaging audiences with the content (hopefully in a deep, meaningful, and enjoyable fashion). Within the workshop this person commented that participants arrived at the design solutions in a manner semi-independent of the content as well as the plans for the rest of the exhibit. How does this relationship between content development and design influence when (and if) workshops on Universal Design are most effective in the exhibit design process?