The Adirondack Museum opened in Blue Mountain Lake. The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake, read the trail head signs & kiosks before you head out to explore. Trust me, for every corner you take, there is probably a cool piece of trivia to quiz someone on later. The quizzes are programmed by the museum using an XML script. Cheap novel and interesting interaction for the visitor to a museum kiosk—the kiosk.
May 28, 2002 LONDON - The museums and art galleries of London house the riches of centuries of scientific and artistic innovation, exploration and empire building. These institutions, many established at the height of the Victorian age, face new challenges in serving a modern, demanding, and international public, such as:. How to let visitors know just what is available in the museum;. How to help them navigate the building and find what they are looking for;. How to make the experience as rich and involving as possible;. How to provide information and interpretation of the exhibits on show; and. How to allow access to the vast body of treasures that simply cannot be housed in the galleries for want of space.
Kiosk technology can provide answers to just about all these problems, and museums have been quick to take up the challenge. Among the London-area institutions that use kiosk technology are the,. Nearly every major institution in London now uses some kind of kiosk, and their differing approaches highlight some key issues for kiosk deployers in all sectors. Here is a look at how two of London's museums - the Science Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum - are dealing with kiosk technology.
Navigating the future The interactive kiosk solution in London's Science Museum is designed principally to help visitors find out what is on exhibit and how to reach each area. The museum is vast and complex, with 10,000 exhibits located on seven floors.
Museum Kiosk Quiz Questions
Despite the use of information desks, wall signage, and maps, navigating visitors has always been a problem for the staff. The network of 42 touchscreen kiosks are positioned around the museum - at the entrance and outside elevators and cafes - and offer information on every gallery and its star exhibits, as well as facilities such as bathrooms. London museums using kiosks 'Although the terminals are on a network, each also has standalone memory, which is used to store the `How Do I Get There?'
Information, which differs for each terminal location,' said Helen Nicholas, the museum's visitors services manager, information. 'The different routes from each kiosk to each visitor attraction number 1,936.' The project was carefully developed over a three-year period. The full complement of terminals was deployed in July of 2000. 'It began in June 1997 with museum staff collating visitor information,' Nicholas said.
'A pilot installation of five terminals went live in early 1998. The pilot was evaluated with the help of schools and students from multimedia courses.' The project is still being improved. A software upgrade is due this summer that will streamline the system and allow quicker and easier updates from the back office system.
This will help staff keep the terminals updated with current details in the Today's Events section. According to Nicholas, future links may be established between the kiosk network and the museum's Web site and internal information system. The Science Museum project is an example of what can be achieved with generous corporate sponsorship. Working with the museum's sponsorship department, gave the museum an unspecified amount at the outset to cover the entire cost of the project, including hardware, software, and some staff costs. ' Our aim in using video kiosks is to present part of our interpretation of the objects, and to help people look more closely at them.' Morna Hinton Education officer, Victoria and Albert Museum's British Galleries section In return, Toshiba receives valuable brand exposure.
The body of each terminal carries a 'Sponsored by Toshiba' inscription. The onscreen menu bar carries a Toshiba button that leads to a screen of brand and product information. Another screen describes some of Toshiba's other sponsorship arrangements with the museum. The electronics company also receives regular statistical information on kiosk usage. 'Toshiba are very happy with their side of the bargain,' Nicholas said.
The Science Museum would not reveal how much the project cost or information on who it worked with apart from Toshiba because the museum holds the copyright on the software. The Science Museum project has earned plaudits.
The UK Centre for Accessible Environments said during an audit of the museum that the kiosk system offered 'strong improvement to access.' The museum was named Visitor Attraction of the Year by the English Tourism Council in 2001 and by the London Tourism Board in 2002. In both cases the award citation specifically highlighted the visitor information system as contributing to the award.
Enriching the experience The Victoria and Albert Museum houses Britain's national collection of art and design, including furniture, ceramics, sculptures, and paintings. The museum relies on traditional guides and maps to help visitors get around, but has also installed video and interactive kiosks in its British Galleries section to enrich the content of individual exhibits. 'Our aim in using video kiosks is to present part of our interpretation of the objects, and to help people look more closely at them,' said Morna Hinton, British Galleries education officer. 'We have a video kiosk showing an 18th century clock working. Others explain the techniques used in creating objects, such as gilding, printing and woodworking.
Information Kiosks For Museums
There are also kiosks to provide contextual background to displays. One such kiosk shows a video about the rituals associated with taking tea in the 18th century. 'Some allow visitors to touch areas of a painting to find out more about the people shown and themes such as costume or gardens,' she added. 'We also have interactions about styles such as neo-classicism or the baroque, which break down each style into elements for the visitor to look for, and conclude with an interactive quiz.' 'While most of the kiosks are aimed at the general visitor, some are used to present specialist information such as the history of registration marks, ' Hinton continued, 'while others offer activities for younger visitors, including stations where they can design a bookplate or a coat of arms.'
So far, there are 20 video kiosks and 40 interactive kiosks in the British Galleries. A further 20 units are installed elsewhere in the museum.
The project utilizes consoles from, PCs, and software, which provides the application and presentation layer. According to Nick Brod, museum multimedia manager, there will be numerous opportunities for future kiosk projects. 'Over the next five to 10 years there will be major redevelopment in all of the galleries and new interactive terminals will be introduced throughout the museum, modelled on those in the British Galleries,' Brod said.
Building an Advanced Touchscreen Application Advanced: Multiple Choice Quiz You can use your new found knowledge to build a PowerPoint multiple-choice quiz. It actually doesn’t require any additional functionality than we used to build our straight-forward exhibit interactive. The quiz page set-up follows a repeating format. Page 1: Multiple Choice Question and Answer options. Page 2: Result – correct answer.
Page 3: Result – wrong answer You need to wire up the hyperlinks so that correct answers go to the ‘correct slide’ and wrong answers go to the ‘wrong slide’. The ‘correct slide’ will contain a congratulation message and perhaps extends the answer in some way. The ‘wrong slide’ provides the correct answer and explanation. Note: While it is possible to keep a running score – this requires the use of code (Visual Basic for Applications Macros). This is outside the scope of these projects. If you were to explore this as an extension exercise please note that PowerPoint Viewer does not support Macros – so in order for it to run you would also need the full version of PowerPoint on the PC.
Advanced: Map Interactive with Videos You can also extend your Interactives by using audio, video or maps. This example uses a map for the main menu and then each location triggers an associated video clip. This main menu page works exactly like the main menu from out standard interactive. The big difference is that I’ve laid out the ‘Image buttons’ on a map.
When a user clicks on a button they are taken to another page (same behaviour as with our ‘Gallery Page’) but this time it shows information and video related to that location. Our ‘Location Page’ is very similar to our ‘Gallery Page’. It still shows some content and has a ‘back button’ to return to the main menu.
The content is laid out slightly differently and has the addition of a video clip as the main feature. To add a Video, from within the ‘Insert Ribbon’ choose the ‘Video’ drop down and select ‘Video from File’ This will bring up a ‘file dialog’ and you can select your video format. As we are using a ‘low-powered PC’ my video files are lower resolution and have been converted to the.wmv filetype. This is a Microsoft standard – so generally Microsoft products are happier using it. Once you have your video in place you can make adjustments to it just as if it was an image, e.g. Size, position and style. To ensure the video behaves as desired we’ll need to change a few settings.
Under ‘Video Tools’ select the ‘Playback Ribbon’. You’ll want to set the video to start ‘Automatically’ and ensure that ‘Loop until Stopped’ and ‘Rewind after Playing’ are both ticked.
Note: there is an additional issue with video playback which may become a problem later. There is a ‘Gotchas’ section at the end of this document that explains how to overcome this.
When the user clicks on a video they will get addition controls to ‘scrub’ through the clip. I felt that the icons were too small to be functional on our touchscreen so disabled them. To disable these too – open the ‘Slide Show Ribbon’ and untick the ‘Show Media Controls’ option. Successfully working interactive By now you should have a successfully working touch screen interactive perhaps involving maps, videos or quiz questions. All that is left is to install this onto your ‘Stick PC’ and you should be up and running. There is one more change to make before we save the file for the final time.
This is to ensure that we set the Slideshow type to ‘Kiosk Mode’. You can find this option in the ‘Slide Show Ribbon’ – choose the Set Up Slide Show option to bring up the dialog.
Then select the ‘Browsed at a kiosk’ option. Save the file – transfer it to a USB stick and then copy over to your target PC.
Gotchas As we are pushing PowerPoint to its limits – there will always be some features that don’t work quite as we would like. In these cases we have to either accept the limitations or find a workaround that fixes our problems. Workarounds are often unintuitive – but in order to have complete freedom to make exactly the application we want we would probably need to employ expensive developers.
Museum Kiosk Software
Problem: Animations not working when you return to a previous slide PowerPoint has a feature that if you go to back to a previous slide it remembers how it was when you left it. Generally when giving a presentation this is a useful feature – however when we are using it to make an interactive this is a hindrance as we usually want each page to reset to their original state. It turns out that If you go to the slide again (only forward) it will reset it back to the original (the behaviour we would like). Note: the video playback is triggered using animations – so if your video isn’t correctly restarting this is probably the reason. Solution There are two options but one involves writing code (macro) – which unfortunately isn’t compatible with PowerPoint Viewer.
The only option available to us is to always transition forward to that slide. So the workaround is to add an additional (secret) blank slide before the real one and have that transition forward automatically after 0 seconds.
The steps for this are:. Insert new secret slide before the real slide. Set this new slide to immediately transition. Update any hyperlinks to point to our secret slide.