We’ve recently been involved in in a proposal for a brand new museum, putting together ideas for a large number of different interactives which address a number of gallery needs and look at a wide range of content.

We always hit the same problem with these projects: that the ambition of the work far outstrips the available budgets. And one of the reasons for this is that we seem to re-invent the wheel for each new interactive.

I can’t talk about the museum in question for obvious reasons, so let’s invent one for a thought experiment. Let’s call it The Ian Museum.

It opens next year and has four main galleries - Piano Heroes, Tea,  Why Football is Dull - and Ian: the Man, the Myth. So that’s a wide range of topics that will typically require a wide range of interactives.

In the traditional model we look at each of the galleries, identify the gaps that could be filled with digital content and then try to come up a wide variety of interesting routes through that content. Let’s have some games, some digital microscopes, a huge electronic encylopedia, a virtual film studio, a massive interactive timeline, a live ‘Video Nation’ style board, a large image of me… the list can go on and on.

Here’s the thing. Why should we re-invent digital content delivery from gallery to gallery? We don’t re-invent the signage or images, beyond gallery or thematic styling, so why do it when bits and bytes are involved.  ‘Hey, we used English in the last Gallery, that’s old hat - let’s write these signs backwards!’

Maybe a better way forward is to create a more standard set of interactives for a museum, the ‘bread and butter’ digital access points to more content. And maybe we shouldn’t give users access to vast swathes of content, maybe we should concentrate on smaller areas and really do them justice in terms of storytelling, design and on-screen/on-wall/on-PDA/on-whatever interaction. Maybe less is more.

Let’s be clear here. I am not advocating a reduction in digital content in museums. For one thing, I’d be doing myself out of a job. There is still room for ‘big ticket’ items in each gallery (that Big Experience thing I’m always going on about) but if we can streamline a large chunk of digital delivery and exploit the efficiencies inherent in this approach then there is more budget left in the pot for the ‘wow! factor’ installations we all love and want.

With that in mind, here’s my Less Is More Manifesto (drum roll…)

We should spend more time doing a smaller number of things really, really well

We should not provide endless amounts of information that the general public don’t want.

Let’s not provide high production value study areas for students and academics. Give them the content they need but deliver it in a more straightforward (i.e. cheaper) manner.

The average museum visitor (and yes I know there probably isn’t one but I never said my manifesto was perfect)  does not expect to come out of a gallery suddenly raised to the level of subject expert, so there’s no need to bombard them with too much information.

The onus is on museums and companies like Cogapp to provide simple and compelling digital experiences that concentrate on the key information, the most relevant stories.

Digital storytelling is a fabulous and flexible way to impart information and just because it can show a million pictures, doesn’t mean it has to.

Finding common ways to distribute information around a gallery or museum frees up budget and time for The Big Experiences. And every gallery needs some of those!

Finally, free 3G iPhones for all museum developers would be nice. But I might be out of luck with that one.

Of course this approach doesn’t work for every gallery and there is always a place for digital collections (at which Cogapp are notable practioners cough cough) but perhaps if we can find some simple but engaging ways of delivering smaller amounts of premium content, which can be duplicated and distributed around a gallery/museum (with due reference to gallery styling etc.) we can free up limited budgets for fewer, but perhaps more successful, big installations. It won’t work all the time, but it might work for some of it.

Right. I need a cup of tea. Now which museum would tell me about that..?

Ever find yourself standing at a bus stop, starring at a poster for the latest Hollywood Blockbuster, and wondering “well, looks exciting, but what’s it all about?!“? ViPR Visual Search, developed by Evolutionary Robotics, promises an answer. Snap the cover of a CD, DVD or book with your camera phone, and it will analyse it and return a description, YouTube link and iTunes store link. Presumably it could recognise (or be programmed to recognise) the film poster too, saving you the trouble of such hassles as typing the film title into a search engine and selecting a suitable result.

It’s already on 3 million phones, and is soon coming as an app for the iPhone
through the App Store, which is fast looking set to be an important way of popularising such innovations.

See demo above

Cogapp was recently accepted onto Apple’s official iPhone Developer Program, so we’ve been thinking a lot about the potential for the device, and technology like ViPR, in our field. This got me wondering….

How about implementing this in a museum, so information, visitor reviews
and audio guides can be activated just by pointing and snapping? How about a
children’s version with alternative, child-friendly content? It would be an easy, playful and really rather useful way of accessing information when and where curiosity arises.

Thinking bigger - what if major art galleries could collaborate on a database, so that when you come across famous works of art you can find out where they are currently on display? It would keep up to date with the movements of famous pieces from one gallery to another, and as you leaf through that book in school or on someone’s coffee table, you immediately know where you might have to go to see the piece in the flesh.

As technology like this improves, and more and more people start to own capable devices, the possibilities continue to multiply. It’s going to be exciting to see how and where such things start appearing. Snap snap!

Welcome once again to another spirited read-through of the screenplay that is the Cogapp internal blog. Let’s kick off scene one with a mash-up.

These boots were made for walking
Spotted by Ian.

A fabulous Google Maps mash-up (what, another one?) which lets you plan and calculate a route on foot. Simple, useful and nifty.

Get your pedestrian jollies at: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

Shiny image fun in your very own browser
Spotted by Sam

Now a lot of us at Cogapp Towers are generally suspicious of super-flashy-yet-purportedly-useful browser plugins, but this one is pretty cool.

PicLens lets you zoom around a wall of photos pulled from sites like Flickr, Google Images or Facebook. It’s slick, and actually quite useful for image searching - we’re not just gimmick-mongering here.

Try it and you’ll see - flying around endless panels of images and videos is really quite addictive. You can even navigate through Amazon this way, which is quite an eye opener…

Oodles of Doodles
Spotted by Gavin

Always trying to organise meetings with people and can’t find a time that works for all of you? Then maybe you should Doodle it!

Doodle is a simple and easy to use online group calendar - think Google Calendars but without the fuss. For example:  if you’re trying to arrange a meeting with a lot of people, you send them a link to a calendar you have set up (which takes 5 minutes), and they tick the days/times they can attend.  When everyone has done this you can see which times everyone can make it and arrange your meeting. Particularly useful if you’ve got people from multiple organisations or departments.

Again it’s a simple but powerful idea, well executed. Doodle doesn’t do much, but what Doodle does do  Doodle does do well. Try saying that ten times quickly on a late Friday afternoon.

And finally…

Let’s be honest. We have lots of ‘and finally’ candidates on our internal blog. Too many to mention here, but here are a few tantalising whistle wetters…

Making movement complexity visible, spotted by Tristan - http://www.moframes.net/

An oldie but a goodie, spotted by Tristan - if Microsoft designed the iPod packaging.
Ah it gets better every time I watch it.

The legendary Johnny Lee returns with intriguing thoughts on flexible display surfaces, spotted by Joe - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhSR_6-Y5Kg

And if you’ve really not got enough things to do today, spotted by Joe - 65 things that look like Pac-Man

And that’s a wrap, people. We’ll be back soon with more somethings from the Cogapp something (it’s late on a Friday, can you tell?)

On Saturday, Andy and I headed up to Alexandra Palace to attend Mashed - a two day hack-o-thon, sponsored and organised by BBC Backstage.

The day started with a whole suite of talks. We saw presentations about Yahoo!’s YUI, SearchMonkey, and FireEagle, as well as BBC Research’s Kamaelia project (which allegedly makes writing concurrent applications ‘as easy as building lego’). There was also a talk from Lonely Planet (prop. BBC Worldwide) about how they are opening up their APIs. However, the most interesting, if the most speculative, talk came from a NASA employee about how they are planning to create autonomous self-organising nanobots to explore space and other planets!

Then, after a quick lunch, it was over to the core business of hacking. For our project, Andy and I reworked the Journey On GPS Doodle codebase to create a game of realworld Tron. For this, I hooked up a laptop displaying Google Earth’s view of Ally Pally to the massive screen, and then sent two GPS-enabled volunteers out roaming the grounds while their teammates directed them using walkie-talkies lent to us by Matt Cashmore. Their paths were then projected onto the view of the surroundings, and they had to run around trying to avoid bumping into their wakes (we wanted to add a Sketchup lightcycle to each runner as a marker, but couldn’t get that working in time).

Unfortunately, we had to leave early, so missed the all-night-hackothon, Ant Miller’s rocket, and the project presentations the next day, but I did manage to talk to a few people and spot the following inventive projects:

• Carbon Goggles
  Created by Jim Purbrick and a host of others, this sees Second Life mashed with AMEE to create a heads-up display of the carbon footprint of real-life objects that have been placed in Second Life. Click on the screenshot below to see a video.
• SocialFlightSim
  A fake wooden plane that you can sit in and control using an arcade joystick, while views of the (Google) Earth pass by on various screens, and its location is twittered to all who care to listen. Click on the photo below to see a video.

All in all, it was a fantastic event that had been very well organised. I’m hoping I’ll see some of the people again at BarCamp 3.

Update 27/6/08: I’ve just been having a look at the presentation videos, and saw that the overall winner was this great project which uses networked CurrentCost meters to play a game with your electricity consumption.

Also see:

• Other blog posts
• Flickr photos
• YouTube videos
• Footage from BBC Click

WWDC is over. And my head hurts. Just so much information packed into such a short space of time. They certainly know how to put on a bash; each and every session was presented in super slick Apple stylee, great venue, great food, great city. The speakers were fantastic, engaging and knowledgeable. As Neo would say…”I. Know. iPhone”

Though the focus was heavily iPhone, there was also a ton of other good stuff. Getting up to speed with Core Animation was a highlight, as well as seeing what Apple have in store for the future, both on the Desktop and in the web browser.

The icing on cake though, was getting an email from Apple whilst out there, saying that Cogapp are now official iPhone developers, so we can start testing our apps on actual hardware. More of which later…..

Yes, it’s that time once again when we roll up our sleeves, plunge our hands expectantly into the digital tombola that is the Cogapp internal blog and pull out exciting prizes for all…

Social networking for your Gran
Spotted by Gavin

This is from a research project created by Middlesex University. In their words the project - known as Jive - is ‘a range of devices that you buy your grandparents. To let them keep up to date and stay in touch with you.’

An intriguing idea linking physical objects and digital communication and one that could clearly be adapted for museums and galleries. One to watch!

‘I’m looking for the mouse’
Spotted by Tristan

According to the always interesting Clay Shirky, that’s what one little girl said when asked by her father what she was doing rooting around behind the telly while watching Dora the Explorer.

Listen to this heartwarming - and thought provoking - story of a digital native, and other thoughts on the ‘cognitive surplus’ in this video from Web 2.0 Expo 08:

Web apps make anarchy easier
Spotted by Gavin

With the current petrol shortage (see how up to date we are?) what better way to find out where the juice is running low than this nifty Google Maps mash-up:

Social hysteria aside, it’s a good example of audience engagement and collaboration and at a very low cost.

And finally…

From Gizmodo, a good example of why you should always take your digital camera with you, spotted by Ian. It’s a twister!

http://gizmodo.com/5016814/why-you-should-carry-a-digital-camera-at-all-times

That’s it for this time. We’ll be back soon with more winning tickets from the Cogapp raffle.

So I survived the queues and the frenzied Mac fanboys, and got into the World Wide Developer Conference keynote. If you haven’t witnessed one of these events, they are a proper whoop-fest, with every utterance greeted with rapturous applause and celebration, like a massive high-five between Apple and its developer community. Jolly good fun had by all.

So the big announcements this year were:

A new iPhone

No surprises here. It’s a new 3G model (running 2.8x faster than Edge, and 36% faster than a Nokia N95), slightly thinner, a flush headphone socket (we are not worthy of such luxury, a headphone socket you can plug headphones into), same sized screen, black back, increased battery life. Bigger suprise was the price: $199 for the 8GB model, which apparantly is going to stay the same across all countries. So 100 quid, for a faster iPhone. Nice!

Oh and it’s got built in GPS. Out July 11th.

iPhone firmware upgrade

No secret this was coming, adding the App Store, lots of stuff for “the Enterprise” (not the spaceship disappointingly), Parental controls etc. But we now have a released timeframe, early July. Free upgrade for existing iPhones, $10 for iPod touches.

Other snippets in regard to the App Store: Enterprise users can deploy apps outside of the App Store to its phones. The app is downloaded to the end users desktop machine, and then synced onto their authorised phone via iTunes. On a similiar note, is Ad Hoc mode, which lets developers authorise up to 100 iPhones, and distribute the app to them for free. Again they sync via iTunes.

Any apps on App Store under 10MB can be downloaded over Edge, anything over this limit is Wifi/iTunes only.

Also there is now support for Apple iWork documents (Keynote etc.) and they have completed support for the full Microsoft Office suite, with Powerpoint now added.

And lastly of note, were the Push Notifications. This is to solve the problem of apps needed to be kept updated, even when they are not running. Take for example an Instant Messaging (IM) app; it needs to display to the user a new message has come in but were it running constantly to check for these, battery life and general performance would suffer. Enter Push Notifications. This is basically a system whereby your server can send notifications to applications via an Apple gateway. The gateway maintains an IP link to your phone, sends the notifications through, and the phone then acts on them. So to reuse the IM example, a badge could be placed over the app icon, displaying 1 message ready to read, and the user could then open the app.

Mobile Me

One that slipped under the radar. Dubbed “Exchange for the rest of us”, Mobile Me is basically a way of syncing all of your Email/Contacts/Photos/Calendars and files between all of your computers, friends and family. Your data lives up in “the cloud” (i.e. on a server somewhere), and is kept perfectly synced at all times. Add a contact on your laptop, and it gets synced to the cloud and your iPhone. Add a picture from your iPhone, and the gallery that you have shared with your family gets the photo instantly.

All this is tied together with a super-slick web based system that looks and behaves like Apple’s own Desktop apps. All for $99/year.

I’ve no doubt missed loads. The most interesting for me has to be the new price for the 3G iPhone, as when we at Cogapp start pushing out iPhone apps (which is the whole point of me being here), the bigger the audience the better.

A few weeks ago the Victoria & Albert Museum opened the doors to its new Jewellery Gallery. The impressive William and Judith Bollinger Jewellery Gallery boasts 3500 jewels from the V&As collection, focussed principally on the last 800 years of European jewellery. The opening night attracted around 1500 people. Not surpising when you see some of the amazing objects out on display (behind heavily fortified glass of course).

The opening night was also a big moment for Cogapp, as we had designed and built three interactive kiosks to allow visitors to search the large collection and find out more about the objects. The ‘Search the Jewellery Gallery’ kiosks let visitors find specific jewels, or explore the collection by applying interchangeable filters such as ‘Material’ or ‘Location’ to pull together custom user-specified groups of objects.

The software also features a deeply zoomable interface that allows the very close inspection of each object’s detail. Given the small scale of some of the pieces, and the fact they must be placed behind glass, this function plays an important part in allowing visitors to really inspect and examine the exquisite detail many of the jewels feature.

We made a video of the interactive in action, as the screenshots can’t quite convey everything. Do follow the link and take a look….

What is a prototype?
A prototype is a rough mock-up of your current approach to your project (be it for a website, an interactive, or something else).

It doesn’t have to be full of content. In fact, we often test with a mixture of guide content and lorem ipsum placeholder text, and it’s not unheard of to have a totally black and white prototype with boxes instead of images.

Why make a prototype?
Prototyping has some big advantages. It helps us plan how the screens will work functionally, as well as graphically.

By testing a protoype with users, we can quickly identify where we’re going right and where we’re going wrong, whilst there is still time to make changes. Wherever possible we test version one with users, make changes and then test version two. Often this rapid approach will be done between a morning and afternoon session, allowing us to take great strides in a single day’s work.

Read the rest of this entry »

Time for a nice cool cocktail, mixed from the finest liqueurs of our internal blog. Here are a few of the things we’ve been drinking, I mean thinking, about recently:

Biggest drawing in the world
Spotted by Tristan

Makes our Journey On GPS drawing look tiny, but then we’re a bit suspicious of all the curls in this one…

White glove tracking
Spotted by Joe

http://www.whiteglovetracking.com/

Internet users collaboratively helped isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. This took 72 hours. The data was then released into the digital wild for people to play with. The results were great.

Got to love the Giant White Glove idea:

Human Brain Cloud
Spotted by Gavin

The Human Brain Cloud is a massively multiplayer word association “game”. A kind of  cross between a tag cloud, the Dictionary and Mallett’s Mallet. Badombom…ping!

It’s interesting because it might help us think about the links users see between different words, plus it’s funny because it asks you to say the first thing that comes in your head when someone says “BLABBY” to you.

iPhone as remote trackpad
Spotted by Joe

http://www.touchpadpro.com

Inflatable New York street art
Spotted by Joe

That’s all for now, we hope you found it refreshing. More coming very soon.