Blog
Kick off of Meeting at Pereas
Our kick off event at Pereas in Corrales was a chance for partners, advisors, and invited guests to connect to begin our discussions about Open Exhibits. Many of the attendees to the summit had never meeting in a casual, social environment made a lot of sense.
Most of the attendees were able to make it and it allowed us to have a much more productive full day, the next day.
on Mar 9, 2011 Open Exhibits Design Summit in Corrales, New Mexico
Next week 30 people will converge on Corrales, New Mexico to participate in two days of presentations, discussions, and activities designed to help guide Open Exhibits future development.
Open Exhibits is just about half-way through its first year and with two and a half years remaining, this is an important time for us to get input from our community about how best to move forward with our project.
We've been busy the first six months. We've released a dozen software modules, but only one, fairly simple, exhibit template. We are hoping the design summit can help us move forward in creating useful templates that explore museum collections, maps, and timelines.
Creating more comprehensive software packages in the form of templates, not just individual modules, should help us expand the project to better serve non-programmers. This should help us further grow our community and get more exhibits into museums.
We have a really amazing group coming out next Wednesday for the design summit. You can see our Partners Page to see who is coming.
We will be posting findings from the event in the form of blog posts. We have also hired a visual practitioner, Lloyd Dangle, who will be capturing the process visually. We will post more about the summit next week.
on Mar 3, 2011 Skinput - Allowing skin to be used as an input device
This has been around for over a year, but is still pretty awesome.
They are ussing the human body for acoustic transmission and gestures to control user interfaces and games.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/cue/publications/HarrisonSkinputCHI2010.pdf
on Feb 22, 2011 Dortmont; collectionviewer with Mapviewer + Serious game Nature & Humans
I'am working on a collection viewer for a touchscreen in our natural history museum/ visitors centre. With this touchscreen we serve tourists, schoolkids and businesstrips with:
- Explanation about collectionitems in the visitors centre (with Imageviewer)
- Touristinfo like hikingtrails, annimal-spot-places, campsites (with Mapviewer)
- Multiuser serious game Nature & Humans (with Webviewer ??)
The Collectioninfo has been made in the Imageviewer and I could easily change the pictures and description of the collectionitems.
The Touristinfo is proposed to show some maps with hikingtrails, campsites etc. The maps show te route, some photos of the hike and some explanation. Maybe someone can give advice how to put Google My Maps (with my different hikingroutes) in the Mapviewer of the template Collectionviewer-1.2 ?
Or how to build a browser-module in the collectionviewer-template, which can open my kml-files of my hikingroutes which I built in Google Maps/Earth (see here).
The serious game Nature & Humans, is for multiuser groups of tourists/schoolkids/businesspeople. In this 'social and digital touchevent', they can learn which animal lives where, who eats whom, and how people can help nature, etc.
I build a simple start level for 5 animals and 1 human. After this, more levels and more 3D-graphics can come. On top I want to build scores when the beaver reaches a willow forrest, the badger reaches the hill, roe deer reaches beach forest, fox eats a bird and human builds an eco-duct over a highway. I hope scores for each player are possible with Flash CS5 IsoView, but maybe someone can give advice on this?
But my main question is here: how to build a browser-module in the collectionviewer-template, which can open my game-file (Flash.exe, flash.swf or something)?
on Feb 18, 2011 Easy Authoring for the Microsoft Kinect with Open Exhibits
Our module for Kinect provides a simple solution for authoring gesture-based applications in Flash. Lately, we've been using it in conjunction with our other free Open Exhibits software modules. While the Kinect device itself doesn't have the necessary precision for use with every module, we have successfully paired it with our gigapixel image viewer, our new VR Panoramic image viewer, and with our Google Maps module.
Our free Kinect module works with Community Core Vision (CCV) software, an open source software package for computer vision. We've used this software in the past with various multitouch tables and other installations. Our Kinect module is a "directshow" source filter, a virtualized webcam device that reads data from the drivers released by OpenKinect.
Here's a video showing the Kinect module working with other Open Exhibits software.
There are photographs of the Kinect and Open Exhibits modules on the OE Flickr site.
In the video, the gigapixel image of El Capitán that appeared in the example was provided by xRez Studio. The cubic VR image of Chichen Itza was taken by Ideum back in 2005 and is part of the Traditions of the Sun project.
This article is cross-posted at Ideum blog.
on Feb 15, 2011 
