DAM Technology

A colleague just pinged me about accessibility in our multi-touch tables and how we’d tried to accommodate. Here were my major points:

• The height of the tables are wheelchair accessible and ADA compliant. We realized that someone in a wheelchair might not be able to reach the entire experience from a single vantage point so in the physical installation the experience is accessible from multiple sides. (Side note, this design constraint was a primary factor in driving the projector selection, the size of the table, using mirrors for the projector throw, and the overall form factor.)

• There’s no sound. We just didn’t include any and I wasn’t convinced it was going to substantially add to the experience especially when we have multiple tables installed. We have the added bonus of being an art museum and our patrons generally like quieter experiences in the galleries, unlike a science museum.

• The display is pretty high contrast in design and execution. Things that are touchable are visually bright, everything else visually recedes.

• We also eliminated any modality in the UI which let us also get by with minimal instructions (There are two instructions, one of three words, the other of 6 or 7).

• The magnified area is fairly large, but this was for a few reasons. First, my personal aesthetics (as is most of the UI, anyway. ;) Second, there’s some imprecision in how the table calibrates (we’re undistorting from a fish-eye lens and the camera capture rate isn’t incredibly high) so having a larger active area covers up the imprecision (we’ve introduced enough fudge in the end result that you instantly accept that it feels right). Third, since your fingertip is the point of interaction we designed so you could see around your finger. Fourth, we delay the removal of the magnified area for a few seconds after removing your fingertip so you can remove your finger and still see what you’re looking at. If you put your finger back in about the same location, the magnified area stays visible. (In software, we’re making assumptions that over the refresh period a touch detection within a given distance and velocity of a previous touch is probably the same touch (if a finger is moving quickly, you may not consistently detect it across the full length of travel))

On the whole, with the exception of the height restrictions, I’m finding that when we do pretty good interaction and UI design that it naturally accommodates impaired audiences. I think if you reach a point where you begin to think you need to do something unnatural to reach a broader audience it’s probably a good point to reassess your design anyway to see if you haven’t artifically constrained the experience.

Exhibition, Installation, Medium Picture

I was at LACMA recently, viscerally enjoying the massive works of Richard Serra. Incredible presence and have made me mentally refer to our own Serra work at the Denver Art Museum as “excerpt” since it feels like just a shaving off of some larger work. I’d love to show you some pictures but as my trusty digital camera emerged from my pocket, security guards were quick to approach and inform me that photography’s not allowed.

Yeah, yeah, I work at an art museum and I understand the issues of copyright and wanting to own image rights to works of art. But, that night, it seemed a little more stupid than usual. Honestly, my small image of oxidized (rust to you non-art types) metal is probably indistinguishable from my many other pictures of the distressed and weathered world. It’s not like Serra emblazes a Louis Vitton-like logo across all metal surfaces and my photographic subterfuge would be revealed.

But to the real point here, where’s the fine line between exact duplication (which is the thing to be feared and why DRM really exists (and this situation is really just analog DRM)) and something changed enough from the original that it’s all okay. And, if we can’t really find this line, then do we need to think it’s there in the first place? Especially in a creative commons world, what holds us back?

Here’s my thought experiment while I was in the shower in the following morning: So, given that a digital image is bad, what if I’m a lousy photographer and my pictures are blurry? Is that still close enough to the original to violate policy? Is it the potential of the perfect image that makes the device the bad thing? What if I had a randomly distorting lens that always shot things imperfectly — some axes through the images are 10-20% stretched or something — does that get me in the clear? What if my camera is more of a camera obscura and I trace the resulting image. Is that bad? (This is different than most museum’s non-sketching policies where they just don’t want pens or other color laden devices in galleries that could deface the actual works.) What if I never display my original perfect image but instead use it in a collage?

Is it the fear that my picture taking is somehow stealing the soul of the original painting? I don’t see at what rational point I actually cross any sort of threshold that’s meaningful.

Better yet, what if I take a picture of another Serra, in a public setting, crop it just so, but claim that’s it the Serra from LACMA… Have I crossed any boundary?

Right? At what point is all of this just silly? What’s the real harm in letting people take away memories of their experiences when they really grooved on some piece of art?

Exhibition, Installation, Opinion

The multi-touch tables are back in Denver after a successful run in Atlanta. (There’s a summative evaluation of them that I’ll turn into a separate post which speaks to the user experience (a success!) as opposed to the hardware (they worked!))

Turns out that the problem with bespoke solutions (and believe me, these are bespoke, although easily reproducible) is that they’re very finicky in setup. Little things like the metal frames that hold the mirrors were each produced individually so each mirror and the projector angles all need to be tweaked and fine-tuned. The electrical setup has been different in each venue, the lighting is different, the museum schedule is different, whine, whine, whine. There’s also that unholy terror of realizing that I’ll get to see them every day and invariably nitpick at whatever’s not absolutely perfect.

So, yeah, a time-suck, but golly, they’re still cool. And, every time I touch one I have that “holy crap, it works” moment. Which, honestly, is kind of fun.

Exhibition, Hardware, Installation

The multi-touch tables are done and have been playing with the public in Atlanta for about two months.

We had two late-in-the-game gotchas that were a bitch to solve: - halogen lighting - surface stickiness

We’d done the initial testing and development here at the Denver Art Museum in our offices and gallery space. They have flourescent (and indirect sunlight) and incandescent lighting, respectively. The indirect sunlight was a pain in the butt — it adds a lot of infrared spectrum light (we’re looking at 945nm-ish) that we didn’t expect and adds bright areas to the camera that either become dead spots (because of background differencing) or variable “light shadows” that look like touches. We fiddled with the sensitivity of the general system and tightened up some of the shape detection that takes place to better differentiate touch vs random sunlight and got things to a pretty good point. The gallery incandescents also added a bunch of random light, but as part of the indirect sunlight solution, we got to good spot that as long as the incandescents didn’t shine directly on the table, we were good.

During the install in Atlanta, we learned that Atlanta uses halogen lighting which is as bad as direct sunlight on the table. It’s incredibly bright in our infrared range and throws everything for a loop. In an intense two week period, we became experts on window surface treatments (we couldn’t solve it exclusively through software), learning that you can’t apply stuff to acrylic (which we use for the top surface) because it out-gasses and will eventually bubble up any surface application. Likewise, we couldn’t switch to regular glass because there’s a lot of iron content in normal glass (view it on edge, it looks green. That’s the iron) which totally blocks our edge-lit IR LEDs. We eventually settled on making camera filters from the a couple of the different window surface IR blocking treatments that got us close — we were never able to perfectly solve it because we just ran out of time, but we got about 90-95% of the way there and given more time we could have dialed it in better.

The second unexpected gotcha was that the tables are too damn popular (net, a good problem) and fingerprints quickly build up during use. The museum staff are finding that during heavy use that they need to do a quick clean of the table surface with windex or similar every couple of hours. We eventually found some cleaning solutions online that help reduce fingerprint buildup which has helped a lot, but still requires some periodic low-key intervention to keep things working well. I’m thinking something bold like rain-x is a better solution, but we’ll wait until the tables are local before we really start messing with them.

It’s funny. The technology was hard and yet it’s been some decidedly low-tech issues that have kept things from being as awesome as I would like. That being said, the tables have been incredibly popular and for all reasonable intents, they’ve been a success. We’re already starting to noodle on their future life once the exhibition is finished travelling.

Big Picture, Exhibition, Hardware, Software

So, we got a Kindle. We wanted to try it out, experience the display, see if it felt like the revolution for e-books was at hand, and see if it was something hackable. Heck, maybe it could even be our device for the ultimate reference library of technology related books in the office. (20 O’Reilly books on a little transportable device would be awesome.)

I’m underwhelmed.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice piece of kit, but after a couple of days and reading a bunch of stuff on it, I haven’t picked it up again. I’ve picked up lots of books since then, though.

Not to echo the rest of the detractors out there, but it bugs me that the device is a destination rather than a tool. Anything I ever purchase on the Kindle is going to stay on the Kindle. I can’t send it to another Kindle, I can’t print anything out. If I switch to another user’s account on the Kindle, the books go away (until I log back in as the original account).

And, the customer experience is just weak. It would have been awesome if Amazon had remembered all of the books that I’ve previously ordered with them and offered me a crazy discount to duplicate them onto the Kindle (those that have been Kindle-ized). But, charging me money to subscribe to a blog, and even having to cough up a credit card just to try out a subscription to a magazine or newspaper is annoying. Rather than playing gotcha, hoping I forget to cancel one of the ten or so things I’d like to try out, ask me for the cc at the end of the trial period. As it is, I’m not trying out anything since I know something will slip through the cracks.

The E-ink display is great, but that’s always been a strong point of e-ink’s stuff (random point of interest (mostly to me), my daughter’s first daycare was across the parking lot from E-ink back in Cambridge, MA). The refresh is slow — the whole screen flashes dark and then redraws — which throws a bit of a speedbump into the reading process, although I think you just sort of get used to it.

Oddly, the thing I’ve been most intrigued by is the little lcd silver slider. It’s cool — it’s silver.

The hacking community is just beginning and while Amazon has given a favorable nod to people hacking things up, there’s not a lot there yet. It’s also a shame that if I wanted to put my own content onto the device that’s yet an additional charge. It feels like there’s potential, it’s just not that friendly yet.

(And I especially hate that every time I try to pick up the device I grab one of the next / back page buttons on the side and change the page.)

Exhibition, Hardware, Installation, Medium Picture

Well, not really. It’s just a pain when the problem was painfully obvious once you realized what the problem was in the first place.

We’ve been working on our interactive table for most of the summer (unfortunately as a part-time gig, rather than the full-time attention that it demands). It’s a hard project, but we’ve been slowly chipping away. There aren’t any of those breakthrough moments where everything just falls into place, it’s just an iterative grind.

I was choking on the guts of the table for about three weeks where we need to have two projectors, two mirrors, two cameras, and a large computer. I kept moving things around in Sketchup trying to figure out the projector throws (an aside rant: why is there no 3D software that lets you model light? Not just the results, but the actual beam of light and have it visually bounce off a surface? everything is a hack.) and coming up with a solution in software that wasn’t working in real life.

The important bit to know is that most projectors don’t project evenly outward. They’re designed to sit on a table or a desk, so one side of the projection is pretty horizontal rather than an even cone.

So, I took a left turn and applied my bold papercraft skills finely honed in kindergarten. I printed out the projector throw and cut it out of a piece of paper. It was great because there was no way for the throw to not work or bend incorrectly. Even better, it was quicker to make changes than doing it in some 3D app (arguably I was using the premiere 3D app, real life).

After about 10 minutes of playing, I stopped and gave a long hard stare at what I was working on and just started laughing since it was painfully evident what my problem had been all along for the previous couple of weeks. I had one of the projector throws rotated 180 degrees and while I had thought I’d correctly measured that angles of reflection, there was no arguing with the paper that I had been getting it wrong all along.

So, lesson of the day: Got an impossible problem and no solution is working correctly? Get out the paper and scissors and do it old-school. Ironic that this would have been easier to figure out 100 years ago.

Exhibition, Hardware, Medium Picture

• Twister
  An interesting 3D display using 50,000 LEDs that spin around the viewer.
• Vertigo System’s Living Surfaces
  Interactive (reactive?) surfaces. Evolutionary.

Big Picture, Exhibition, Installation, Software

Food for thought: this post at the Re-Imagineering Blog in which the author roundly criticizes Eisner’s “What’s the Story” mantra starting in the mid-80s. Essentially, one of the overarching concerns in any new Disney attraction was making sure that there was underlying story and plot points along the way. Arguably good in theory, bad in practice. The post lists 14 attractions that follow the same basic premise — something/someone is lost, the guests help find it/them.

So, the moment of self reflection for me is thinking about all of those exhibits over time in which we’ve wanted to create a story, or very deliberately, convey context. In museums, we argue that without these underlying elements, seemingly random objects or events potentially lack meaning. Do we need to do this? (The answer is no, and I think is just the ongoing tension between interpretation and display which is a fine line to be repeatedly crossed to find a good balance for different museums).

Even more interesting to me is that the author of the Re-Imagineering post points out that in the current story-driven environment that experiences that convey pageantry and experience alone couldn’t be created. And, they’re arguably some of the most compelling attractions at Disney ever — It’s A Small World, Jungle Cruise, the original submarine voyage, etc. In the museum context, are curators (traditionally pushing for the more non-interpretive experience) really just coming from the same place as Walt himself was in originally creating Disneyland? And that all of the bad stuff in the last 20 years at Disney really just the bad playing out on a large scale what it means to be overly focused on interpretation?

Big Picture, Exhibition, Opinion

We got the Printed Circuit Boards back from the fab shop last week and I spent a few days this week inserting all of the components and getting things soldered up. They turned out great, and our design of wiring a couple in series works like a charm. It was the first real soldering project I’ve ever done, and I’ve learned the very valuable lesson that wires and components can get really hot during the soldering process. It’s also incredibly gratifying to watch the solder soak up into the little holes and around the wires.

So, this generation is for our next prototype table in which we start to work out projector angles, size of mirrors for the bounced image, and more of the wiring. Oh, and also hopefully starting to work out how to keep more of the IR actually in the table rather than also illuminating an area above and below the plane of the surface. Hopefully just some baffling or something, but we’ll see.

In any case, I’m really proud of our PCBs and they look like they’re going to be a great solution. I was expecting them to come back green, so I was a little surprised, but I’m still psyched with the end result.

Exhibition, Installation, Little Picture

They highlight the interactivity of the exhibits and also suggest that the topics discussed and how they’re presented wouldn’t be possible without technology. Located in Washington DC.

Big Picture, Exhibition