We are working with the University of Michigan Exhibit Museum of Natural History to design an augmented reality interface for an iPhone app. In a museum setting, users would view an exhibit through the iPhone camera, and the app would recognize it and overlay information about the exhibit and visualizations about its relation to other exhibits. This is a great opportunity to brainstorm creative ways to explain works of art or science without a tour guide and without the limitations of audio-only pre-recorded tours, and really define how ubiquitous computing can be designed to better inform us of our world.

first round of sketches

Posted: February 11th, 2009 | Author: The ARMuseum Team | Filed under: Presentations | 4 Comments »

After brainstorming the kinds of things we’d like to explore representing, we split up and did a number of sketches each, and then got together to discuss what we liked and didn’t like about our sketches, and consolidated a final list of concepts to sketch up in a second iteration of lo-fi prototypes. The sketches are all viewable at the ARMuseum Gallery site.

Our professor, Mick McQuaid, made some interesting comments about our brainstorm list and this reply pretty well sums up where we’re going from these sketches, so rather than writing a separate blurb about what’s going on at this stage, the comment is reproduced below.

“We did indeed struggle with the concept of building affordability into the device so patrons wouldn’t be standing in front of exhibits fiddling with their iPhones. After discussing our first iteration of sketches, we threw out things like having lots of little function buttons and pop-up menus, and after talking about these shortcomings, we decided to approach ARMuseum functionality as a platform.

By the nature of the approach, this generalizes and simplifies what we expect the device to be able to do, which basically means we’re building on the concept of 1) showing active items and 2) giving contextual options for a selected item like here, here, and here. By viewing interaction as a platform and establishing patterns, we kind of get that issue out of the way so we can focus more on the content and context. In any case, we have another round of sketches brewing on this concept, and we’re also going to be sketching out concepts of social mapping more.”


Functionality brainstorming

Posted: February 1st, 2009 | Author: The ARMuseum Team | Filed under: Functionality | Tags: | 4 Comments »
  • maps
  • timelines/evolution (slider or dynamic functionality) with thumbnails of related material (can expand)
  • view of entire evolutionary map with highlights dependent on location
  • contextual directionality (”on the left”)
  • outline overlays for dioramas: predators, food chain, evolution (is this alive?)
  • “clothes on/off” mode for skeletons and taxidermy models
  • “Could I kill it? How would I cook it?”: interaction with people
  • person or object for scale
  • audio for birdcalls or similar sounds
  • outside links section for vetted online material (videos, wikipedia articles)
  • take advantage of being able to walk around a 3D exhibit: highlight key points and features
  • user-driven recommendation system
  • saving favorites for retrieval later
  • “here’s the teeth you should be looking at”: emphasis on existing features/display
  • mechanical display: movement
  • social network of content creators
  • GPS/barcode location
  • art museum: see underlying old paintings on same canvas
  • see local objects within a given radius
  • glacier paths or other geological impacts
  • outline of dig site: see relationship between objects in a given exhibit
  • games to interact with existing non-interactive exhibits
  • color-coding for existing non-interactive exhibits