Mobile and Multi Channel
Naturally, the mobile trend has not passed the museums by. A large number of sessions were dedicated to this topic ( Workshop Mobile strategies and business models , Workshop Mobile untours, Mobile and geolocation issues , Multi-channel , Mobile crit room and Mobile parade ).
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Loic Tallon , compiler of the book “ Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience “, presented a number of conclusions from his research International Museums & Mobile Annual Survey . He distinguishes between museums that are active on mobile, museums that have mobile plans and museums that do not have mobile plans. It is striking that museums that are active use mobile mainly to support the visitor and his museum experience (physical or purely online), while museums with mobile plans mainly want to use it for marketing purposes. A bit of a strange objective, because you first have to promote your app, which then promotes your museum. Perhaps mobile-active museums have learned that this does not work well or museums with mobile plans are still a bit naive.
Museums appear to differentiate little in target groups and would prefer to make everything for everyone. Perhaps they think that, given the general funding they receive, it is not possible to approach certain groups more consciously, or even to actively exclude them. The latter of course happens with every iPhone app, which can only be used by people with an iPhone. Incidentally, this more conscious segmentation plays a role across the board (see also online collections) and not only in mobile interactions.
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Mobile signage
Several museums use mobile phones to make the often large and complex buildings more accessible and to show the way to exhibitions, certain masterpieces, the restaurant or the toilets. The immense American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York has such an app for the iPhone " Explorer ". This app, the 350 loan iPods and the WIFI infrastructure were financed with a substantial injection from information company Bloomberg (also known for Michael Bloomberg, the current mayor of New York). The entire museum is equipped with WiFi so that a TomTom-like navigation is offered indoors. I was in New York prior to the conference and tested this app with Peter Gorgels from the Rijksmuseum. We came to the conclusion that the app works particularly well when it comes to navigation, but it does not add anything to the museum experience (except that you can quickly reach the nearest toilet with a full bladder). In a workshop, the AMNH explained that further development is planned, that the collection has not yet been digitized, which makes it difficult to provide additional context. The British Museum (also a huge and complex building) also presented his research into navigation in a multimedia tour .
Mobile Crit Room and Mobile Parade
2 sessions dedicated entirely to mobile stood out: Mobile Crit Room and Mobile Parade . The concept of the crit room is doing particularly well. There were calls to present more failures instead of projects that apparently always succeed. In the crit room, 3 mobile projects were discussed by a team of experts for half an hour each. This yielded interesting findings about the design, the way of installing, etc. The experts differed in opinion on whether an app needs a clear menu or whether discovering is also a rich experience. The presented apps were still strongly based on page-based point-and-click mini websites. Apparently we still have to develop or embrace new idioms for these mobile applications.
A special iPad app that was discussed was Field Guide to Victorian Fauna by Museum Victoria . Also a bit of a website in an app, but well made and filled with very nice content that is fully downloaded, so that the iPad can go into the field. They want to make this app available open source. This may be an ultimate opportunity for the Dutch species register . During the Mobile Parade several short presentations were given that were a breath of fresh air compared to the sometimes long presentations with many bullets on PowerPoint slides.
Augmented reality
Within the mobile field, augmented reality has increasing interest and possibilitie qatar phone number list Examples of recent museum mobile augmented reality are UAR by Nai , Street Museum by London Museum and the Berlin Wall in Layar . I was responsible for a workshop “ augmented reality and story telling ” together with Stedelijk Museum and a paper about the ARtours project and mobile augmented reality in general. During the workshop we created an augmented reality concept with the participants and we used the CMS Visar to show a number of objects during a walk through Philadelphia in Layar . Our presentation was included in a broader session about augmented reality .
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During the Mobile Parade, the Layar project of PhillyHistory.org was presented. At the Stedelijk, we often struggle with the question: “How do you use augmented reality to provide context to modern art in the city?” Historical information and historical images in particular are very suitable for this. You place these images from the camera point of view in the physical environment and people can see (similar to UAR) what was once there. That is what PhillyHistory.org is going to do. They came to the conclusion that it is still quite a challenge to position images really well within Layar. As technology advances, this problem will be solved. My earlier conclusion that mobile augmented reality feels a lot like the early days of the web (tables, animated gifs, frames) was also confirmed during the Mobile Crit Room. There we showed the Jan Rothuizen project developed together with TAB Worldmedia within ARtours .