- September 2nd, 2008
- Filed under Art, Technology
Student using Global Origins
If you find yourself wandering through the Asian Art Galleries here at the IMA, take a quiet moment to follow the sounds of the Qin music. You will be led to a giant LCD display with a touch panel overlay and a hair dryer-esque sound dome above your head. Global Origins represents one of the first applications developed in-house by the IMA and marks a pivotal point in how the museum approaches technology.
I’ll step back a moment now and introduce myself. My name is Charlie Moad and I am an Applications Developer (a.k.a software developer) here at the museum. Now before you conjure up thoughts of suspenders and lisps, let me assure you I am quite the contrary. I have never played Dungeons and Dragons and I was only addicted to World of Warcraft for 6 months! I started at the museum 2 years ago and we have since hired another software developer and a graphics designer. Together we form what we call, the Applications Team. Traditionally museums outsource their technology which can be very expensive and time consuming. Each project requires bringing a new consultant up to speed on the basic operations of the institution. We allow the museum to retain knowledge and be more flexible when approaching technology.
Now back to Global Origins (GO). GO is an add-on to the NASA developed 3D world viewer, World Wind. Visitors are presented with a spinning globe and a series of stamps with works of art on them. Touching a stamp spins and zooms the globe to the respective origin and provides more information on the work and the culture. The application is meant to provide users with a visual orientation of where some of these works originated.
Global Origins using World Wind by NASA
We have been secretly collecting stats on this application since it was placed in the galleries almost two years ago. I pulled these stats a few days ago and found some impressive numbers. From October, 17th 2006 to August, 28th 2008 we have recorded 372,366 individual touches of the display. This averages almost 550 clicks per day with single day totals peaking over 3000. The graphic below represents where on the screen people have been clicking. The “hot spots” are in the expected places with one exception. People have a tendency to touch in the middle of the screen where the red and white target is located once a work is selected. While touching these targets has no effect, it definitely indicates the user wants more information about these geographic locations.
Click Heat overlay of Global Origins
Now let’s take a look at what works of art the users are interested in. Below is a table which contains the 11 works that appear in GO. Following that table is a chart containing the number of times a work has been selected by a visitor. The spread seems fairly even except for two standouts. It’s somewhat refreshing to see that the bright woodblock print of Mt. Fuji has a slight lead, and I suspect that the shar pei dog came in a strong number two because people like pictures of funny animals.
Number of Views by Work
This post will be followed by similar ones that offer the outsider a peek into the technology operations of the IMA. There is a common theme that allows us to be productive. Open source software allows us to create a wide array of applications varying from the in-gallery interactive mentioned above to the blog you are reading right now.
September 3rd, 2008 at 8:07 am
Welcome to the Apps team! We are glad to have you blogging!
September 3rd, 2008 at 10:23 am
How would you design this application differently, based on some of these findings?
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
All in all, we have been very happy with the stability and ease of using Global Origins. That heavy clicking in the center tells me that people really want to select a location to see what work is there (it’s google maps fault). This is the reverse of the current implementation. Thinking back, I don’t think this interaction was possible. We also had to restrict the user from interacting with the globe directly. While it is a really cool experience, too many bad things could have happen for a public interactive.
September 5th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Is it possible to translate your application to the web? If so, do you have any plans to do so? We would like to implement similar geographic based tools, but wanted them to be available for students who cannot visit the museum.
September 5th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Funny you should ask. As an exercise/demonstration for MW2007, we did exactly this. I put the result online so you can check out the result for yourself.
http://athena.imamuseum.org/gowww/
September 5th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
If I may ask, how do you collect the stats for the touchscreen?
Jason Bondy
Oklahoma History Center
September 5th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Global Origins is just a plugin to World Wind and it has the ability to react to events. Part of the click event handler logs the x,y coordinates of the click. We also log when an artwork is selected as well as some other application specific events.
September 7th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Wow! Congratulations on an impressive application. And thanks for posting your usage stats.
March 24th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Amazing application! Are there other stats like this which show where people visit the most? Are you going to develop this further?
August 7th, 2009 at 8:45 am
Charlie, How do you collect data and how many Editors work on it?
Thank you,
Lets Brainstorm-Teamworks
August 8th, 2009 at 5:39 am
Charlie, you can develop this application on Adobe air. Browser based. Something like this http://www.earthbrowser.com/ plus i have two great concepts, that people/kids also will love to join, learn and share there efforts in a fun way =) , hoping to collaborate with you.