what will the museum of the future be like?
What is the future of the audio tour?
I'm doing a piece for NPR's All Tech Considered Blog on the rise of the cell phone tour as a replacement for the traditional handset-rented audio tour in museums, zoos, etc.
As I understand it, even cellphone tours are becoming dated technology. So, what is the next step in audio tours? Are there some examples of cutting edge technology used in museums? Is there a good way to differentiate information for kids and for adults?
Please include name and contact information if you'd like to be quoted for the article.
As I understand it, even cellphone tours are becoming dated technology. So, what is the next step in audio tours? Are there some examples of cutting edge technology used in museums? Is there a good way to differentiate information for kids and for adults?
Please include name and contact information if you'd like to be quoted for the article.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Loic Tallon on -
Thanks for the linking to my blog post Lynda.
And to compliment the content/user psychology stuff I wrote about in the blog, I thought I'd add a few hardware related comments.
To answer your/Ryan's question about examples of "cutting edge" technology in mobile interpretation, www.mobilemuseum.info is the site to go to. It includes a number of fascinating casestudies:
- At the Dallas Museum of Art. See http://tr.im/pE9C
- At the Indianapolis Museum of Art. See http://tr.im/pE9P
- And at the San Jose Museum of Art. See http://tr.im/pEaS
I also love the this graphic on next generation handhelds from the 2008 Tate Modern Handheld Guide conference. See: http://tr.im/pElD
With regards whether cell phones are the future of audio tours per say, as the above examples suggest, it depends how you define the cell phone. I think its pretty inevitable that the future of audio tours, and mobile interpretation in general, will be cell phones-based, but museums will probably be using them for their web browser functionality rather then phone-call functionality. And although the projects above are exceptions, I'd say that the museum industry as a whole is a few years from that right now.
Right now, the common cell phone based audio tour requires visitors to dial a number on their phone, much like listening to their answer phone. This type of system has become relatively popular with museums as its cheaper for the museum - they don't have to purchase a quantity of hardware - and they make audio tours possible in complex/outdoor sites where distributing hardware to visitors and ensuring it is not stolen is difficult.
However they transfer the financial cost on the visitor in terms of them using their minutes of phone time, and foreign visitors in particular resist this strongly as they will be paying roaming rates whilst abroad. Also, phones don't have natural play/pause, forward and rewind buttons whilst in 'call' mode, meaning the content navigation is far from intuitive.
My 50cents worth though is that these type of audio tours will decline as mobile internet-platform tours become a more viable option.
And yes, bluetooth distributed audio tours do exist - I trialled one this w/e in Paris at the Musee Cuny - but I'm not convinced. They may allow visitors to receive the audio tour for free (in this case downloaded stop by stop) but the download times are a little lengthy, and require a relatively high level of technical proficiency to complete: I doubt my parents know what bluetooth is, never mind how to turn it on on their phone!
Ultimately I think its unlikely that the 'future' will be a one-hardware solution for mobile interpretation. Just as content types are diversifying - linear, multimedia, interactive, social networking, encouraging visitor's to leave content etc. - museums will adopt whatever hardware can best meet their tour objectives and the expectations of their target audience, whether it be a visitor's own WIFI enabled device or more traditional audio guide like those sold by Antenna Audio or Acoustiguide.
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Permalink Reply by Des Griffin on
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Permalink Reply by NancyProctor on -
Peter Samis of SFMOMA & I discuss the future of audio tours in a podcast for the Museum Mobile series which I hope to be able to publish this weekend at http://museummobile.info/archives/category/podcasts (it's currently with Peter for review). I think the headlines are that it's not really about the technology but rather about radical changes in business models, content, and user experience design in a way that is more aligned with emerging social media practices.
In addition to the links Loic provides below, you might also want to check out the Handheld.org conference held on June 3 by Learning Times. (contact Jonathan E. Finkelstein jonathan@learningtimes.net)
I suspect this will also be a major topic in the interview I'm doing on Sun BlogRadio, Socially Speaking program on June 29 at 4pm EST.
Happy to talk about my favorite subject further at anytime! Nancy Proctor
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Permalink Reply by Ryan Kellett on -
Thank you to all of you for providing feedback. This is an interesting ongoing discussion.
Please don't let this stop the conversation on this topic, but you can find my blog post here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2009/06/cell_phone_tours....
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Permalink Reply by Jeff Swyers on
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Yes the cell phone tours are becoming dated. The new rage is smart phone apps like the iPhone, Blackberries and the like. Current audio tours can be easily converted into an application which will also allow you to add other multi media content like videos and pictures to tell a story. You can make the application into any type of tour you want. In the application you can have a kids tour section and a adult section. All within the same App. The app can be downloaded from the iTunes store for personal devices, or the museum can have some iPod touches that they can either rent or give free tours with. This replaces the "wands" and other audio devices that we currently see in use.
Jeff Swyers
GeoQuest Technologies
j.swyers@geoquesttours.com
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Permalink Reply by Scott Guerin on -
Not only do venues not make a compelling case for renting a tour, all too often the tour content is an overlay on whatever interpretive components already exists. Only one museum I know of, a science museum in Kuala Lumpur I designed, integrated mobile and fixed content into the interactive displays at the project's inception. That system, the ARIF, based on an Apple Newton, is still in use 11 years later.
Museum visitors are rarely compelled before their visit, to download a GB of content or more. That's about the minimum for the application and basic content in one language for a small museum.
Hence, I believe there will always be a need for rented devices or for rapid data upload on the spot at dedicated, and of course, universal terminals.
Near-future devices will augment reality using heads-up display eye glasses. Bone conducting audio delivery will eliminate sanitary concerns of ear buds etc. Microphones and cameras will be integrated. Voice activated commands, gesture tracking, and potentially, haptic capability will be built in. To top it off, they will have lenses that auto focus for near and far-sighted visitors.
My goal is to experience any interpretive space, what I call an Interpretopia, as if you were walking along with an expert being told information and asking questions in response. BUT, the achilles heel is interior wayfinding and location awareness. High powered servers can locate you using cameras but networks would bog down. High resolution infra-red systems have resolution of a millimeter but it's not clear to me how they discriminate one person from another. Rice-grain-sized atomic clocks (in development) would be a good solution as they allow for real-time signal triangulation.
2 years max. for a working system; I'm already in the early stage of an augmented-reality iPhone project.
S
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Permalink Reply by Amelia Bowan on
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Check out Razorhurst, produced by d/Lux/MEDIA ARTS.
I went to a presentation by the director of dLux and the creator of Razorhurst and was blown away by what they are doing.
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Permalink Reply by Luigina Ciolfi on -
As part of a feasibility project at our centre, we are looking at portable augmented reality on smart phones: camera phones can recognize fiducial markers placed around an exhibit and display multimedia content in overlay.
This article is a good overview of AR, including mobile AR:
http://uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/08/inside-out-interaction-des...
Lui
Luigina Ciolfi
Interaction Design Centre
University of Limerick (Ireland)
www.idc.ul.ie
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Permalink Reply by Loic Tallon on
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On the topic of the future of audio guides, together with Learning Times, we've put together the following online survey which explores many of the questions form this thread inc.
- Why do / (or don’t) museums use handheld guide?
- How do we perceive the medium’s future?
- What are the biggest challenges etc.?
The survey is being distributed internationally, and we'll be publishing the full results & raw data online for all to see. We think the results will provide a fascinating collective insight into useful next steps with mobile interpretation.
It would be fantastic of people could find 10 minutes to take it: please do! ;-)
The survey can be found @ http://tr.im/ALUg
And for more background about the survey please see http://www.learningtimes.net/handheldsurvey
Happy days,
Loic.
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Permalink Reply by Maureen Ward Doyle on -
I'd be delighted to talk with you about Open Museum, a new web-based service that supports free audio tours (among other things...) for museums. The US non-profit Heritance (of which I'm the Director), is creating this service in order to make it possible for any museum -- regardless of its resources -- to provide richer information to its visitors and more open access. Open Museum is free, non-commercial and not-for-profit.
On Youtube there is a 3-minute video on how Open Museum supports cell phone access to museum content (Digital Outeach Viral Loop Screencast):
http://blog.openmuseum.org/2009/10/digital-outreach-viral-loop-scre...
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Permalink Reply by yves apeloig on -
Perhaps the next will be behavioral geovector device ?
A device free hands, which knows what you are looking, inside as well outside, and how much you are interested.
And send you a enriched reconstitution of your path according your point of view and your preferences by Internet
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Permalink Reply by yves apeloig on
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In my opinion, the starting point, construction of the human, in all meanings, depends on the relation with the reality.
Reality is coming first and is unsurmountable.
Media, whatever the level of sophistication, are crucial, essential, indispensable but they always coming after the experience of the reality which is structuring .
If I think to a device in that way, the first challenge is a really really free hands device with no need to handle any device, to manipulate it. Not an automatic one which means I have to follow it. The device has to "follow me".
In second position, the user as to be the center of the process and the acquisition mode of the system has to be the behavior's user in real time
In third position, the system has to be able to work everywhere, inside as well outside. It has to be autonomous. No further equipment required.
And finally, a reconstitution according user's centers of interest has to be possible threw Internet
The result is the possibility for curators to media the contents as they want
For the user to get what he want, what he feel, eventually helped by remarks.
And to get enriched contents according precisely his own point of view and preferences.
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