It’s been several weeks now since the first Museum Mobile Summit was held in London at the Tate Modern.  As we told you in earlier blog posts (here and here), we had a good crowd in London and made some solid progress in our critique of the initial proposed TourML standard.  Notes from that meeting are available on the Museum Mobile Wiki and are interesting to glance through.

Since the meeting, we’ve been collecting thoughts and integrating the suggestions of the group into the formalized language description of TourML.  In preparation for the next Museum Mobile Summit on Wed Oct 26 in Austin, TX, we’ve updated and reworked the TourML specification to address the results of the first meeting.

I’ll say that TourML is feeling much more complete and much more like the real-deal.  As always, we’d love a lot of comment and input from the community, and would love to hear about ways you would like to use mobile tours in your museum.  We’re already seeing a number of museums building and creating mobile tours using the early version of TourML and the vendor community has been very supportive of the effort as well.

For those technical and metadata experts in the crowd,  you can download a new version of the TourML XMLSchema or browse it from the source repository for the TAP project you can also check-out a sample instance of some valid XML for a tour.  In the rest of this blog post, I’ll detail the changes that have been made to the standard, and will enumerate the reasons for those changes and some questions that still remain for discussion at the next summit.

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Filed under: Technology

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

I’m a software developer, so obviously I am talking about the ancient practice of embedding hidden features into software.  Even the left-brained need a creative outlet of some form.  I thought I would share a few of the software easter eggs that I know and enjoy.

• A slight twist on Isaac Asimov‘s 3 laws of robotics.

Type 'about:robots' into Mozilla Firefox

• An excerpt of the book of Mozilla.

Type 'about:mozilla' into Mozilla Firefox

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Filed under: 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

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Filed under: Art, Technology