Last week, I was lucky enough to spend a few days in London at the 2010 Tate Handheld Conference where a group of really smart folks were gathered to plan and brainstorm ways that museums can take advantage of new advances in mobile technology.

Planning the Future of Museum Mobile Experiences @ Tate

Many of you may know that the IMA has been really active in building mobile content for our main website, our special exhibitions, and 100 Acres.  One of the things I love about working at the IMA is that we always try to give a little love back to our museum buddies when we undertake new projects.  That’s why we’ve made all the software for these mobile experiences available for free to anyone who’d like to play around with them.

While I’m happy that many museums can pick these tools up and use them for their own content, it won’t be the right solution for everyone.  In fact, it only solves just part of the problem.

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Filed under: Technology

Thanks to everyone who participated in our survey last week! Your feedback means a lot to us and has provided some interesting insights into how this little segment of our audience is thinking about mobile tours. As promised, here are the results we got from last weeks questions. I’ll generally try to summarize a bit and I’d be really interested in your thoughts / comments about what you see in the data too.

The graph below shows that most people are really intrigued by the possibilities of accessing mobile content from their own devices, follow by slightly fewer respondents who felt like they’d prefer to rent a device that was guaranteed to work.  If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know that we most recently released a tour for the 100 Acres park that anyone with a internet-capable smartphone can experience. (visit http://www.imamuseum.org/ on your mobile phone and look for 100 Acres)  Internally at the IMA we’re still looking for that “right” balance between devices that we maintain and a user’s own device.  We’d be interested in your feedback in the comments if you have a good thought or opinion.

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Filed under: New Media, Polls, Technology

Have it Your Way!

Well, our intrepid team of media and software guru’s are busy preparing to launch our first outdoor mobile content tour to highlight the opening of 100 Acres this weekend.  Folks are a little bit frazzled and wishing for the sunshine, but I think we’re all universally excited about the incredible stories there are to tell in the park.

While we’ve ironed out our initial set of tour content for 100 Acres, we could use your help in planning the next great escapades we undertake for mobile content.  So, in the great tradition of McDonalds… if you could “Have it Your Way”, what should our next mobile tour look like?

If you’ll answer a few of these questions, I promise to come back next week and share with the class all we’ve learned from your responses!  We’ll take the best ideas from this survey and see if we can wrap them into our next mobile tour!

Thank You! -Rob

Filed under: New Media, Polls, Technology

Web designers know that the industry involves plenty of change, and continuous adaption and development of skills is required in order to stay up to date. In the past few years, one of the biggest areas of change has been the amount of web-savvy users who are accessing their favorite sites via phones and mobile devices. (via smashingmagazine)

To coincide with the opening of 100 Acres, we are releasing a greatly enhanced mobile version of our site, with more content accessible from mobile phones. Anyone with a modern phone using Webkit (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, etc.) can explore the IMA online by visiting http://www.imamuseum.org right from their device.

The cool thing is, our website automatically detects if you are on a mobile phone,  and you will be sent to the mobile version of the site. You’ll have quick access to upcoming events and general visitor information (hours, directions). You can also check out our twitter, facebook, flickr, and videos.

We’re excited to also release a rich experience in the 100 Acres section of the mobile site. In order to provide trail maps we turned to OpenStreetMap, which we like to describe as the “Wikipedia of maps”. Anyone can contribute and edit map data. You can draw new features directly on maps or upload GPS trails from a device. On our site you can toggle between trail maps provided by OpenStreetMaps or satellite imagery provided by Google. The map is also aware of your geolocation, and will place a blue dot exactly where you are in the park.

OpenStreetMap: The "Wikipedia of maps".

We are going to provide a rich mix of art and nature tour stops to give visitors access to videos, photos and text for specific locations in the park. We plan on updating nature stops to highlight when certain plants are in bloom and to show you where we see some of our furry friends.

100 Acres mobile landing page.

Toggle between satellite and trail maps.

Interactive tour stops for works of art and nature.

In the series of screen shots below you can see how to bookmark the IMA mobile web site on an iPhone to make it look and feel like a native application.

Press the "+" to add the site to your home screen.

Select "Add to Home Screen"

The site now acts like an app.

Mobile view of http://www.imamuseum.org

Don’t forget to take some time to look up from your phones when in 100 Acres!

Filed under: Art and Nature Park, Technology

Auto-rotate proved more confusing than anything else

Yes, the image above is supposed to be confusing. It’s one of the lessons learned from collecting feedback and tracking events on the TAP iPod tour for Sacred Spain. Patrons didn’t quite realize that as they interacted with the tour, we were secretly shooting off messages to a server.  We tracked everything from incorrect codes to device rotations.  All in all we collected over a quarter million events.  Almost half of those events were rotations of the application layout.  We heard back from people that they were “catching up with the rotations”.  Based on this we have decided to flat remove any rotation from the next tour. Everything will be in portrait mode with the exception of video playback.

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Filed under: Technology