New Media Initiatives Blog

WebWalker is getting touchy feely all over in this edition with some computer interface goodness.

• This one might be a bit old, but it seems Panasonic demonstrated some sort of multi-touch table a last year, as well as a gigantic interactive video wall. I don’t really know how to describe the table. The video looks very nice in 720P glory, but the narration that goes with it is worth a chuckle and the interface is just a bit weird. Translucent fish?
• Another big multitouch screen, this time from DAHAN T&S (via nuigroup via engadget). This time we get dolphins instead of fish, but my questions still remain, why so many creatures of the sea on multitouch screens? There’s no video, so I can’t tell if their dolphin talks like ours.
• Speaking of sea creatures, did someone say calamari? The iPhone is certainly putting some pressure onto the demand for multitouch, we should remember multitouch is not actually that new. Case in point, Powerbook trackpads have been multitouch for years, giving users that lovely two-fingered scrolling. Apple even owns a multitouch patent. The iPhone is taking the idea and coupling it with a screen, which is really the important part. I’m rather curious to know how it works and what kind of tech they’re using to make it happen. None of us in NMI plan on getting an iPhone for various reasons, so who’s going to be the first person to take apart their iPhone?
• And while it is not multitouch, this is a neat project: The digital newsstand. It is basically a newspaper box with a computer screen replacing the window showing todays issue. It is not entirely practical, but I certainly appreciate consistency of the visual language and presentation. If you were going to show newspapers, you might as well do it in the right box. (via Paul)

Danah Boyd has a really good look at the social divisions that are emerging in the use of Facebook and MySpace:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

She also discusses the role that aesthetics play in this breakdown:

This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but it is pretty clear to me that aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

I should note here that aesthetics do divide MySpace users. The look and feel that is acceptable amongst average Latino users is quite different from what you see the subculturally-identified outcasts using. Amongst the emo teens, there’s a push for simple black/white/grey backgrounds and simplistic layouts. While I’m using the term “subaltern teens” to lump together non-hegemonic teens, the lifestyle divisions amongst the subalterns are quite visible on MySpace through the aesthetic choices of the backgrounds.

This lines right up with what I found when I talked to some of the WACTAC teens a few months ago. I’m still contemplating what this means for a museum, or any institution that wants to reach audiences. We need to be all-access and blind to class lines. Yet, at the same time, there is also a drive to maintain the and re-enforce the image (brand) of the institution itself.

It may all be moot, though, because some people tend to think that there is a saturation point for all this social networking / web 2.0 activity, and it is quickly being approached.

Roger Dooley at Futurelab:

…the rising tide of total time spent online (number of users and hours per users) has lifted a lot of boats, but inevitably online activity will become a zero sum game. People who spend more time on one activity will cut back other online participation by the same amount.

and Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion:

However, there is definitely a bubble and therefore a crash coming. It's not financial. It's not related to the level of noise or startups. This crash is personal. We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law.

I think the lessons are clear, extend beyond social networking, and can be easy to implement. Don’t try to grow a community where one doesn’t exist. Go to where the community already is. Make the information that users want free of any sort of restrictions. Don’t make me sign up for an account, everyone I already have too many. Don’t make me give you my email, I already get enough junk. Let me as the user choose how much I want to interact, and reduce all possible barriers to interaction.

Daniel Shiffman dropped a quick note about a new article in Metropolis Magazine covering IAC’s video wall:

To project a 120-foot-long high-definition video image requires not one but eighteen sequential projectors perfectly calibrated with computer software so that the point at which one projected image starts and the next takes over is barely discernible--a process called "edge blending." When Al Gore stands in front of a giant projected graphic of CO2 emissions in An Inconvenient Truth, edge-blended projectors are working behind the scenes. To choreograph, translate, edge-blend, and calibrate the imagery requires an entire room of computers. All in all, says Steve Zink of Warren Z Productions--which produced the software system and the spinning globe--it uses enough power to "run a small house or two." So much for LEED certification.

It is a quick but interesting overview of the wall, and some of the projects and content IAC is putting on it. It sounds like they also face a lot of the same issues we face with the Hennepin Signage: projectors aren’t cheap, easy to align, synchronize, or see in the daylight.

The IAC Building site has a video of the projection if you sit through all the flash nonsense and click video wall, or just grab the FLV directly.

Here’s a youtube video from what seems to be some sort of dance party:

If you didn’t know, this wall is in the Frank Gehry designed headquarters for InteraActiveCorp. Wired had this to say about the building and Gehry several months ago:

The new headquarters for Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp stick up from the low-rise terrain of Manhattan’s West Chelsea neighborhood like Space Mountain at Disneyland. The 10-story asymmetrical protuberance has outer walls that veer every which way, a typical design for architect Frank Gehry. But the building’s showstopper is a facade that looks like sails billowed by the wind. Gehry, famous for his complex compositions in titanium and stainless steel, had never before designed a major building in glass, and he was shocked to learn how difficult it would be to soften and mold the material around the contours of the building. Each of the 2,541 pieces of glass would have to be heated to 1,148 degrees Fahrenheit, then cooled and shaped. It was physically possible, but the sheer size of the project made it seem inconceivable. “We didn’t think we could do it,” Gehry says. “We were going to abandon it.”

So it would seem technical hurdles and setbacks are nothing new for this building. The narrative is one that we’re familiar with too, but such is the price of being cutting edge.

Just a quick note, as we’re busy prepping for the sold out After Hours Preview Party tonight. As per usual, the pictures from Party People Photos will be uploaded to flickr during the event, and will show up in this set and also in the After Hours group pool. Don’t forget to join the group and add your own photos if you’re at the event and have a digital camera.

We’ve set up something special to happen with the photos (see above). I’ll share more after the event is over.

Interesting method to create a multitouch surface:

I guess most of the people reading this will have seen some of the multi-touch demos by Jeff Han, Apple and Tactiva. I wanted to play around with some ideas that required a multi-touch pad, but there aren’t any devices available (Tactiva aren’t shipping…)

Long story short, I made a simple one from a plastic bag, some dye and a camera.

This is interesting, but there are a couple problems with it. First, it is just a multitouch surface, not a screen, making it a lot different from Jeff Han or Apple. There is no projection onto the back, and I can’t see an easy way to ever project onto or into water or other liquids. Secondly, $2 is pretty cheap, but you get what you pay for. You might want to spend $3 to get the heavy duty freezer ziploc so that it would last a week of touching rather than an afternoon. A true FTIR screen made of plexi or glass will be more expensive, but the screen itself is never the expensive part. A fancy FTIR screen in an enclosure might cost $300, but that is still nothing next to the computer, projector and software needed. And a plexi FTIR screen will probably give better blobs, since not the whole surface is going to morph when pressed on.

That said, it is still an interesting exploration and use of what I am assuming is touchlib.

[Via Daily Irrelevant]

If you’ve been to the Walker recently, you may have noticed that the Bazinet Garden Lobby has a bit more light in it these days. You may have also noticed that the Vineland kiosks have a new screensaver on them.

The screensaver on those kiosks is something that Eric had played with before. I also made a version of a screensaver that uses more of Walker Expanded, and posted about it a few months back. In depoloying it to the iMacs, though, I ran into some trouble. The machines we’re using have their graphics driven by a lowly GeForce FX 5200, the 64mb lame dog of the quartz extreme world. When I put the screensaver on them, it would create horrible drawing problems, similar to the artifacting you would see on a jpeg file at the highest compression, except worse.

This hung me up for a while, but at some point I decided to try again. Through a process of trial and error, I figured out the magic bit that was missing was the Clear object:

Paints the entire rendering destination with a constant color and clears the depth buffer. This is usually the first rendering operation a composition should perform, in order to reset the rendering destination to a known state and prevent visual artifacts. If the rendering destination is intended to be composited over some other visual content, make sure the alpha component of the color used to paint is smaller than 1.0.

Dropping a clear object in there did the trick and the saver was now running quite well. Sometimes it is the simple, obvious things that are missed the most easily. Here is a rendered preview of the kiosk screensaver.

The trick to getting the background pattern bars to swoop in the way that they do is to use two different interpolation objects, one for X position, and one for Y rotation, feeding into a sprite. Both objects should be set to the same duration. The X position simply moves the sprite from left to right (-4 to 4), and the Y-rotation (-30 to 30) changes the tilt as it moves right to left. Since they’re both running at the same duration, the animation appears very smooth. Put this all in a macro patch, copy and paste a bunch, changing the duration, pattern and color, and you have our flying identity patterns.

I would love to give away this screensaver so those of you on Mac’s could enjoy it, but it depends the fonts Walker Expanded and Avenir. It is possible that I could convert the identity patterns to images and change the typeface to Arial or Helvetica and get pretty close. Would anyone be interested?

Here’s a larger image of the Kiosks in the Bazinet Garden Lobby, with the new Vineland entrance being prepared in the background:

One of the cool things we’re doing for the Walker’s upcoming exhibition Picasso and American Art is significantly increasing our iPod audio tour capacity. For the exhibit we were able to get 25 iPod Video’s, and like our normal iPod audio tours, we will be letting visitors use them for free. The same content is also available on Art on Call.

This presents a bit of a challenge however. Up until now we’ve only had four iPod Nano’s to worry about, and plugging a few into a computer or two to charge isn’t that big a deal. Now however we have 25 of them to deal with, and there certainly aren’t enough USB ports to go around. The goal was to find a way to charge most of the iPods, do it in a limited space, and do it for as cheap as possible.

My solution was to buy three USB hubs and use them just for charging. We don’t really need to have them connected to the computer to sync with, we just want the power. This turned out to be harder than I thought. I went through a few USB hubs trying to get the iPods just to charge off the supplied AC adaptor. Each hub I tried didn’t allow this. It would only charge when the hub was connected to a computer via USB. I can’t fathom a reason why they limited it like this, as the power comes from AC on the hub, not from USB. Whether the hub was connected to a computer should not really dictate whether power could be supplied to the device or not. Alas, there was no cost efficient way around this.

So I had no choice, if I wanted to charge via any hub, I had to connect the hub to a computer. Thankfully we did have a computer near where our iPod storage is. Except it only has two open USB ports, not the three I needed. Another stumbling block. But then the thought occured to daisy chain the hubs. In essence, the USB cable that was supposed to go to the computer for each hub would plug into one of the other hubs instead. The last in the chain would then plug into the computer. Basically we could connect all of the iPods to a computer with one USB cord, regardless of how many hubs we had. And that’s what we did, as it worked perfectly:

One interesting feature of this is it allows us to mount all of these iPods at once, as you can see here. This actually makes adding and editing content on all of them a breeze. So in the end, perhaps all of the troubles were a blessing.

Total cost for this: $60. It may not look the prettiest, but sometimes when you’re trying to be frugal, getting something that just works is what counts.

One of the first big projects I worked on when I came on board here was redesigning the Walker shop’s online storefront. This effort has now come to fruition and I’m happy to present the new Walker Shop. Here are some interesting tidbits about the design:

• The design makes heavy use of our identity system, Walker Expanded, as implemented on Shop materials, and extends this into the web version.
• The shop home page borrows the poster design metaphor from the main Walker homepage, since it works well to exemplify the different neighborhoods, and in the shop, item categories.
• Each of the item categories also have different photography in the header that closely tie in with the items as they are seen in the physical shop.
• In creating the design, I also did research on what information shoppers look for or need when shopping. The resulting pages are located in the bottom 3 columns on every page.
• The cart icon in the shop is from the Drunkery Love icon set and the plus icon is from urlgreyhot.

In terms of technology powering the site, we worked with EVT Retail to handle the back end work. EVT hosts the entire operation, but their software is able to talk to the point of sale system and inventory system that our shop uses. This means that the online shop has accurate knowledge of what items are for sale and how many we have left. Not every item that is in the physical shop is online, but there is much more available than the old shop. The new shop also talks to our membership database so patrons with memberships can also get their 10% discount (it shows up in the checkout process).