The New Jersey State Museum

Announcements

  • 1st Exhibit Critiques are due next week before class, be prepared to present your critique
  • Frank Migliorelli, Director of Experience Design at The New York Public Libraries, will be our guest speaker next week
  • Frank will also be presenting at next Friday’s Brown Bag Lunch

Homework Assignment

Exhibition Critiques – visit a museum and critique and interactive exhibit. Here’s the template for the assignment, due before Oct 3rd class.

 

Augmented Reality & the Internet of Things

Announcements

  • Sarnoff Innovation Lectures
  • Additional resources from Ben Gross:
    1. Radio Age Archive:  This website contains PDF versions of RCA’s in-house publicity magazine from 1942 through 1957. It is especially useful to see what technical or commercial accomplishments the company wished to publicize and the marketing strategies it used.
    2. RCA Engineer online index: This online database contains articles from 30 years of RCA Engineer, a technical magazine circulated among RCA’s various operating divisions. Its articles are more technical, but often contain useful biographical information about their authors.
    3. CED Magic:  The definitive website about the RCA VideoDisc system.  In addition to materials about RCA’s various home video projects and a full catalog of VideoDisc titles, it also boasts a “Who’s Who in VideoDisc” section that draws upon internal company biographies.
    5. Lots of commercials & films on Youtube and the Internet Archive
  • The New Jersey State Museum visit is next week! We’ll meet here at 9:30 and drive over
    • Need cell phone numbers for field trip form

Homework Discussion

What was your favorite example of Augmented Reality from the reading this week? What examples did you find “in the wild”?

Guest Speaker

John Kuiphoff – IMM Professor, developer & designer, specializing in web development, interactive art and physical computing

Trend: Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality Could Save Your Life

What is Augmented Reality?

Reality ———-> AR ———-> Virtual Reality

Triggers

  • Feature Recognition – markers, QR codes, images, colors, etc.
  • Positioning Data – location, orientation
  • What kinds of devices have cameras, GPS & accelerometers?

Augmented Reality & the Web

WC3 Augmented Reality Group

Why use it in Museums?

  • In exhibition space – provide additional levels of interpretation
  • Outside the exhibition space – extend exhibition reach and provide additional levels of interpretation for digital/print exhibit media

Augmented Reality with HTML5

Libraries for Native Apps

Alternative Apps & SDKs

Examples

More Background on AR

IMM Digital Tour Exercise

  1. Divide into three groups representing three tracks at IMM
  2. Log into the class blog and create a post for your track
  3. Go to http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ and create QR Codes for your track page
  4. Cut out & place QRCodes around AIMM building
  5. Take it for a test drive and suggest how it could be made better

Trend: Internet of Things (IoT)

According to Wikipedia:

“The Internet of Things refers to uniquely identifiable objects and their virtual representations in an internet-like structure.”

The idea is that objects can be directly connected to the internet, transmitting or receiving data, or be tagged in such a way to have digital representations of the objects be accessible over the internet. And, increasingly, much of that IoT traffic is M2M.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVlT4sX6uVs

History – http://postscapes.com/internet-of-things-history

Roadmap – http://robertoigarza.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/rep-six-technologies-with-potential-impacts-on-us-anexothe-internet-of-things-nic-2008.pdf

More info on IoT – http://postscapes.com/internet-of-things-resources/

How do we connect everyday objects to the internet?

examples:

The Internet of Things is about sensors and networks

The Internet is the network of networks

examples:

How do we connect sensors to networks?

Wireless networks:

WiFi

  • rangle: ~ 150′ indoors, 300′ outdoors
  • topology: Hub, typically connected to internet
  • bandwidth: high
  • speed: high
  • energy consumption: high
  • platforms: Most smartphones & micro-controllers
  • examples: – Processing w/Ketai library https://code.google.com/p/ketai/

But a lot of the value of connected objects is local

Bluetooth

Bluetooth Low Energy

NFC

RFID

QR Codes

Choosing your implementation options

– Who’s your audience?

– What are the characteristics of the exhibition space?

  • Wifi
  • Interference
  • Lighting

– What’s easiest, least invasive, least effort for your users (how can you make the technology “disappear”)?

– What’s simplest to implement?

– What is most maintainable/durable?

– What fits in your budget?

Functional Prototype Ideas

  • Interactive Guide to the Vacuum Tube Carousel
  • Electron Microscope Simulation
  • Interviews with retired RCA researchers
  • Integration of collection objects not displayed on the exhibition floor

Homework Assignment 4a (5 points)

  1. Read the following: (1 point)
    • Inventing the Future: Extending the Power of Sight (pp 64-73)
    • Inventing the Future: Transmitting Intelligence (pp 74-83)
  2. Create a new page in your Design Notebook with the heading “Inventing the Future IV” (1 point)
  3. Look through the Collection Opening Items listing, the associated item texts and the collection bibliography. Which Collection Opening items & references relate to the chapters above? Search the bibliography sources for more information on one or more of the items. What sort of interactive experience could you create to demonstrate the items; how they work, or the context in which they were developed? Write down your thoughts in your Design Notebook & cite your references. (3 points)

Assignment 4b  (5 points, 1 point each)

  1. Read the 2012 NMC Horizon Report pp 27-30
  2. Read the AAM 2013 TrendsWatch pp 24-29
  3. Create a new page in your Design Notebook with the heading “Internet of Things”
  4. Take a look at some of the examples of internet addressable objects currently used in museums on pp 27-30 of the Horizon Report and on pp 24-29 of TrendsWatch, and write a paragraph about your favorite example.
  5. Can you find any other examples of the “Internet of Things” being used “in the wild”?  Jot down a brief description & a link to what you find in your Design Notebook.

Submitting Your Work This week’s homework assignments are due by next Wed, Sept. 25, at 5:00 pm EST. When you’ve completed them, post a comment on this page (Augmented Reality), including a link to your Design Notebook.

Exhibition Critiques Your first Exhibition Critique is due in 2 weeks on October 3rd. Here’s the template for the assignment.

Studio Time

Mobile Apps

11:00 @ Sarnoff Study Center

Speaker: Ben Gross, Ph.D., Research Fellow, Center for Contemporary History and Policy

Review Homework

Trend: Mobile Apps

When to design for mobile?

User Context – What are they doing? Why are they accessing our content? Where are they?

Going Mobile

HTML5 (web apps) vs Native Apps HTML5 Pros & Cons

  • Pros – easier/faster to build (HTML, Javascript, CSS)
  • Cons – performance (extra app layer in there), limited access to hardware & sensors, users have to do more work getting there

Responsive Design Basics – Flexible Layout, Flexible Images & Media Queries

Example 1

Common Responsive Design Breakpoints

Bootstrap – Twitter’s ‘Mobile First’ Responsive Framework

Closing the ease of implementation/performance gap with code converters like PhoneGap, Trigger.io or Titanium

Native Apps

  • Pros – performance, direct access to hardware & sensors
  • Cons – lower-level programming required, (sometimes) more expensive to implement

iOS – requires developer account, Objective C-based

Android – Open Source, Java-based

Processing & Mobile Apps

Examples

Functional Prototype Ideas

Exhibition Critiques Your first Exhibition Critique is due in three weeks on Thurs, October 2nd at 5:00pm. Here’s a template for the assignment.

Homework Assignment 3a (5 points)

  1. Read the following: (1 point)
    • Inventing the Future: The World on Display (pp 48-55)
    • Inventing the Future: The Bionic Future (pp 56-63)
  2. Create a new page in your Design Notebook with the heading “Inventing the Future III” (1 point)
  3. Look through the Collection Opening Items listing, the associated item texts and the collection bibliography. Which Collection Opening items & references relate to the chapters above? Search the bibliography sources for more information on one or more of the items. What sort of interactive experience could you create to demonstrate the items; how they work, or the context in which they were developed? Write down your thoughts in your Design Notebook & cite your references. (3 points)

Assignment 3b  (5 points, 1 point each)

  1. Read the 2012 NMC Horizon Report pp 19-22
  2. Read the AAM 2012 TrendsWatch pp 20-22
  3. Create a new page in your Design Notebook with the heading “Augmented Reality”
  4. Take a look at some of the examples of AR currently used in museums on pp 21-22 of the Horizon Report and on pp 20-21 of TrendsWatch, and write a paragraph about your favorite example.
  5. Can you find any other examples of AR “in the wild”?  Jot down a brief description & a link to what you find in your Design Notebook.

Submitting Your Work This week’s homework assignments are due by next Thurs, Sept. 18, at 5:00 pm EST. When you’ve completed them, post a comment on this page (Mobile Apps), including a link to your Design Notebook.

Studio Time Tuesday’s TED Talk – Jake Barton: The museum of you

Open Content & Big Data

Announcements Inventing the Future books are here!

What’s on for Tonight?

  1. Reading & Homework Discussion
  2. Guest Speaker, Emily Croll, Director of the TCNJ Art Gallery & Sarnoff Collection will speak about the history of the Sarnoff Museum at TCNJ, collection management and the Sarnoff Collection Management database.
  3. Break
  4. Trend Discussion: Open Content & APIs
  5. Studio Time – Design a simple API

Reading & Homework Discussion

So? How’d it go?

Guest Speaker

Emily Croll, Director of the TCNJ Gallery and the Sarnoff Collection

Trend Discussion: Open Content & Big Data

Art Out and About

What is Open Content?

What is Big Data?

Anatomy of an API

Three Tiered Architecture:

The Data Layer

Collection Database Resources – This is your database of collection records, could be in a database management system like MySQL, or even in flat files like CSV or Excel.

The Application Layer

Application Programming Interface – A middleware application in a server-side language like PHP, Ruby, Python or Server Side Javascript (Node.js) that responds to user requests by querying the database and returning the results of the requested action. There are some decent lightweight frameworks available that simplify creating RESTful APIs.

REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs work like web pages, but for machines. You build URL strings to tell the API which resource you want, and make a single request for that resource.

The Presentation Layer

  • Websites
  • Mobile Apps
  • Kiosks/Installations

Designing an API

When designing a RESTful API, use nouns to to identify resources. Limit your base URLS to two; one for collections, and one for specific items within a collection.

Examples: /collections - retrieve a listing of all collections /collections/12345 - retrieve info for a specific collection

You can then nest resources to reflect associations between resources.

Examples: /collections/12345/items - retrieve the collection of all items in a specific container /collections/12345/items/54321 - retrieve a specific item in a specific container

To perform actions, use the following HTTP methods when making your REST requests:

  • GET – return the resource set
  • POST – insert a resource
  • PUT – update a resource
  • DELETE – delete a resource

Pragmatically speaking, you’ll often find POST being used in lieu of PUT and DELETE to edit and delete resources.

For more details on good API design, check out Web API Design from Apigee.

Why use APIs? Mashups!

Functional Prototype Ideas

  • Create an API for the Collection Opening items & texts.
  • Mashup the Collection Opening API with data from here or here.
  • Mashup a timeline and map of inventions & events using the Collection Opening API.

or

  • Add to the Collection by Crowdsourcing stories or objects from retired RCA employess still living in the area

Studio Assignment

  1. Write out a sequence of user stories describing the steps a user might take to drill down to a specific item, in a specific collection using an API to the Collection Opening Items database.
  2. Design a RESTful API (on paper) using the data structure from the Collection Opening Items listing and the associated item texts.
  3. Using your API, write out a sequence of URLs the user might navigate to fulfill the user stories you captured in step 1.

Homework Assignment 2a (4 points, 1 point each)

  1. Read the following:
    • Inventing the Future: Information On A Beam of Light (pp 28-39)
    • Inventing the Future: Teaching Computers to See (pp 40-47)
  2. Create a new page in your Design Notebook with the heading “Inventing the Future II”
  3. Look through the Collection Opening Items listing and the associated item texts. What items relate to the chapters above?  What sort of interactive experience could you create to demonstrate the significance of one of more of these items? Write down your thoughts in your Design Notebook.
  4. Create a couple of user personas to identify what types of museum visitors you would target for your interactive experience.
  5. Write out a small sequence of user stories that would describe your interactive experience.

Homework Assignment 2b  (6 points, 1 point each)

  1. Read the 2012 NMC Horizon Report pp 11-14 and create a new page in your Design Notebook with the heading “Mobile Apps”
  2. Take a look at some of the examples of Mobile Apps currently used in museums on pp 13-14 and write a paragraph about your favorite example.
  3. Can you find any other examples of Mobile “in the wild”?  Jot down a brief description & a link to what you find in your Design Notebook.
  4. Read the 2011 NMC Horizon Report pp 14-17 and create a new page in your Design Notebook with the heading “Tablet Computing”
  5. Take a look at some of the examples of Tablets being used in museums on pp 16-17 and write a paragraph about your favorite example.
  6. Can you find any other Tablet examples “in the wild”?  Jot down a brief description & a link to what you find in your Design Notebook.

Submitting Your Work
This week’s assignments are due each Thursday before the next class, at 5:00 pm. Late submissions will be docked 1 point. When you’ve completed them, share your Design Notebook with me at thomesoni@gmail.com. For a Design Notebook template, see my comment below on this post.

First Day of Class

Introductions
Let’s go around the room & introduce ourselves. What are your favorite digital production tools? Do you consider yourself to be a writer? A designer? A programmer? All of the above? What do you hope to get out of the class? What make and model of mobile device(s) do you use?

Course Objectives

  • Apply your skills in digital media production, writing, interaction design and programming to development of a system with a real-world audience and real-world implications.
  • Consider the challenges of designing interactive media for a group experience in a particular physical space.
  • Analyze and critique similar software and installations.
  • Employ industry-standard tools and develop skills & strategies for managing a long-term collaborative project.
  • Learn to integrate their own skills, techniques and processes with that of their classmates.
  • Learn to articulate and advocate for their ideas in a collaborative setting.

Course Structure
Think of this class as the interactive exhibit design studio for the Sarnoff Collection Museum. Each of you are members of the design team, and we’ll be working together over the course of the semester to research, design, develop and demonstrate interactive exhibits for the Collection space or website. In some cases, projects may be invited for inclusion in the actual exhibition.

The course schedule is designed (roughly) to follow an iterative development methodology like you might experience working at a larger museum or commercial design studio, and you will develop your prototypes in incremental stages. Your deliverables will include…

Course Deliverables
Design Notebook – Your Design Notebook we will be updated weekly over the course of the semester, and will capture your research and thinking as the course progresses.

Vision Document – The vision document is your roadmap for the design and development of your prototype, capturing information about your intended users and functional & non-functional requirements.

Exhibition Critiques – You’ll complete two critiques of existing “real-world” interactive exhibits.

Field Trips – You’ll also make two field trips to nearby exhibitions to experience selected interactive exhibits in situ.

Functional Prototype – Your final deliverable is a functional interactive exhibit prototype, which you’ll demonstrate at least twice (early prototype & final demonstration).

Prototypes can be broad, presenting novel ways to navigate the entire collection for example, or narrow, presenting a cross-section of the collection by theme, form, etc. They could also be specific, going into great detail with a single object. Here are some example exhibit types.

Prototypes can implement aspects of one or more of the trends explored in class.

Grading
We’re taking a “gamified approach’ to grading in this course. You’ll all start out with 0 points, and then ‘collect’ points as you progress through the course. Points collected will then be weighted in the following manner:

  • 25% Final demonstration
  • 25% vision document
  • 20% Exhibition critiques
  • 20% design notebook
  • 10% Field Trips

Course Materials:

Note: Additional topic-specific materials may be provided during class, with links posted on the blog entry for that class.

What Makes a Great Exhibit

Check out this series of video interviews with David Harvey, Senior Vice President for Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History

Assignment 1a ( 5 points, 1 point each)

  1. Create a Presentation on Google Drive to use as your Design Notebook.
  2. Create a title page, then add a page called “Inventing the Future 1”.
  3. Read the following:
  4. Think about how you use technology in your daily life. Have you encountered any of the technologies described in the reading? Write down your thoughts in your Design Notebook – just a paragraph or two is fine.
  5. Look through the Collection Opening Items listing and the associated item texts. Are any of the items related to any of the technologies described in the handouts? If so, make a note of them in your design notebook, along with your thoughts about how they’re related.

Assignment 1b  ( 5 points, 1 point each)

  1. Read the 2012 NMC Horizon Report pp 23-26 & TrendsWatch 2014 pp 24-31.
  2. Take a look at some of the examples of open content & big data currently used in museums and other settings on p 25 in the Horizon report & p 30 of TrendWatch.
  3. Create a new page in your Design Notebook with the heading “Open Content & Big Data”.
  4. Write a brief paragraph about your favorite example(s).
  5. Can you find any other examples of how museums are using Open Content/Big Data “in the wild”?  Jot down a brief description & a link to what you find.

Submitting Your Work
This week’s assignments are due each Thursday before the next class, at 5:00 pm. Late submissions will be docked 1 point. When you’ve completed them, share your Design Notebook with me at thomesoni@gmail.com. For a Design Notebook template, see my comment below on this post.

Questions?
Post a comment with any questions – others may have the same or similar questions, or may have the answer. Of course you can email me at thompsom@tcnj.edu as well.