New Media Initiatives Blog

The museum technical community got some good news today: MuseTechCentral officially launched. Billing itself as the MCN Project Registry, the site seeks to “provide a place for the MCN community to share information about technology-related museum projects”.

After some quick browsing (encouragingly, there are already a good number of entries, including several cell phone tour projects I was interested in) it was easy to see the potential of the site:

• When starting a new project, it’s smart to see if this problem has been solved before. If so, how? And for how much? Is it worth the investment? Or is there a vendor to avoid? Now you can find out.
• Vice versa, upon completing a project, you may find yourself being hit up constantly for information requests. Now you can now simply refer people to your project page on MuseTechCentral.

While I was there I created an account and added our Art on Call project to the registry. The site is full of ajaxy goodness that makes form entry and navigation a breeze, although I do wish you could bookmark filtered results.

So far the projects seems to be fairly art-museum-centric, but hopefully that will change as more institutions start to contribute. The registry will be most useful if it truly represents the museum community, so if you’ve got a project to add… go add it!

Overall, this is a great effort by the Museum Computer Network and the Museum Software Foundation. Looking forward to future browsing and adding many more projects!

[via Musematic]

Here’s an interesting problem that came across my desk several weeks ago. Lets say you want to know exactly how many people are in a gallery at any given time. How do you do it?

There are expensive people counters available, with all sorts of technology, right down to thermal imaging. There are also cheap hand held counters, with plus and minus buttons to add and subtract people as they come and go to keep a consistent count of people in a gallery.

These cheap hand held versions are great…if you only have one entrance and exit point. What if you have multiple entrances and exits? Suddenly the hand held version falls apart, and putting cameras all over is way too expensive.

This is the issue that was put forth to me. We have an upcoming exhibition for Frida Kahlo. The gallery that the exhibition is in can only support 200 visitors at any one time. We expect more than that, especially on busy days. The kicker of course is that the gallery it’s in has two entrances, so we needed to find a way to accurately count how many people are in the gallery at any given time, and if that number goes over 200, the gallery guards would have to hold people from entering until the number dropped below 200.

I thought for sure something like this must have been made before. Surely we aren’t the only people who have ever had this problem? But in looking online I couldn’t find anything that was cost effective and would “just work”. We kept saying “if we only had two clickers that could talk to each other”.

Something interesting happened the same day I was presented with this problem. Apple announced the iPod Touch. As soon as I saw the Touch, my first thought was Art on Call and the Walker Channel. I could see all sorts of uses for both in the galleries. But after a couple hours wrestling with this given problem it hit me, why not use the iPod Touch?

The iPod Touch is handheld, has touch input, and a browser with wifi built in. All we had to do was make a simple web app for it that counted up or down. Two people could have the Touch’s, check off how many people are entering and leaving, and both be up to date on exactly how many people are in the gallery. So that’s what we did.

Here are some screen grabs of what I built. The left image is the typical display of the app. Options are simply to add or subtract a certain amount of people as they enter or leave. You’re able to reset the counter to zero in the upper right (it has a confirmation before doing so). The right image shows what happens when you go over the gallery maximum. The app also auto updates the number every 10 seconds, so the guard who has people waiting will know when the the number drops below the max value right away without needing to manually refresh.

Making a web app specifically for the iPod Touch (or iPhone) turns out to be really easy. It’s just a webpage. You pretty much can do anything that is available in Safari (though there are a few inconstancies to watch out for), and there are also several special meta tags you can add specifically for these apps (for example, I turned off scaling for our web app). Apple has written up a very nice development doc on their website that I used when making this app. It includes things like screen size, font size, color, meta tags, basically everything you need to make something look nice and stylish on these devices. I’d recommend it to anyone working on apps like this. The screenshot to the left is how the iPod Touch looks with the rest of the UI around it, to give you an idea.

As far as the iPod Touch/iPhone goes, I’m very impressed. I really do think these devices are the future of museum audio tours. Well, not just audio, but video as well! There are things that need to be fixed (like the fact that you can’t get podcasts on them via wifi yet), but overall there is so much potential here, simply by having a real browser with wifi on it and supporting rich media, as well as the UI and multi-touch interface. It could very well be the Rosetta Stone of digital museum tours.

Brent beat me to the punch with his Picasso iPod post. Much to learn from this project which gave us an opportunity to compare the same tour on iPods and cell phones. I was waiting for the phone stats and survey results but you'll have to come back for that information.

As Brent said, the iPods were a huge success. In the course of the exhibition (June 16-September 9), over 3,500 visitors borrowed the iPods (25-23 devices available for free and loaded with the exhibition tour only). In busy periods, people queued for the tour. And in these same busy periods, visitor services found the loan process almost more than they could manage (witness the drawing on the envelop accompanying the last bunch of checkout sheets).* I sought a donation from Apple (they gave us 5 iPods, we bought 20) but fact is they should have paid us for this kind of promotion. In addition to providing a rewarding interpretative experience, we taught a new generation how to use the iPod--a common refrain heard at the front desk, "now I can tell my grandchildren I used an iPod!"

Despite their popularity, the iPods will only be used for special projects (3 remain available for the permanent collection tour but ultimately we prefer visitors bring their own hardware). That said, Walker is working with Antenna Audio and SFMOMA to produce a multimedia guide for our upcoming Frida Kahlo exhibition, available on Antenna's new XP-vision™ player for $6.

* This drawing is in no way a reflection of the demeanor of front-line staff who are often complemented for exceptional customer service. “Kill the iPod” courtesy the artist Joe Rizzo.

So the Picasso exhibition is over and we learned a lot about mass iPod audio tours. The first lesson, they’re very popular! We’ve had iPods for our permanent collection for a while now, but we never really had the push behind it like we had for Picasso. The difference I noticed here is that if you advertise it, people will use it.

We did a lot better job for the Picasso show in getting the word out that the iPods as well as Art on Call were available. People used them. There were very often waiting lists for people to check out an iPod. I had honestly thought at the beginning that 25 iPods was overkill, but after a short time it was obvious we could have probably had twice that and still had all of them in use at any given time. A lot of this was because of the show itself. A ton of people came to see Picasso. I’ve never seen that many people in our galleries before, outside of After Hours. And this was day in, day out. But like anything, word gets out, people in the galleries see others on their cell phones or with iPods and learn they can do the same (for free) and people really ate up the content. We will post more on our numbers when the final data comes in.

So that’s great, people dug the content, but what were the caveats? For us there were several things that came up that we had to work around. One is what I already mentioned, the iPods being checked out constantly. Because of this, none of the iPods during the day got a chance to recharge. Most made it through an 8 hour day fine, but what we didn’t expect was having to charge them over night. Because they needed to be locked up somewhere safe when the building was closed we had to find a secure place to take the charging station each night, and thankfully we were able to.

Also, at first we were going to use one of the computers at the front desk to dock the iPods on, but given the traffic, that didn’t go over well as that computer needed to be used off and on all day for ticketing, etc. But we still needed a dedicated computer there just for the iPods. We thankfully had a spare Sony laptop that sufficed for this and did a good job.

There was also something that came up that I never had even thought about. I originally put the iPods down in a floor cabinet which could be closed. This was partially to be neat and tidy and partially for security. Problem was, we were so busy and swapping out so many iPods that the Visitor Services staff started to really strain having to bend over again and again to swap out iPods all day. Thankfully our carpentry shop rectified this by making a pedestal that the iPods could go in to make it easier on everyone’s backs.

And what about dead and abused iPods? Several notes here. One, Notes mode works better now than it did when I first used it and dismissed it and then instead hacked the iPod firmware. But there are still major issues with Notes mode. While better, it’s still not ready for prime time and there are still ways for users to change settings even when locked into Notes mode (which I’m still trying to figure out, but given the number of iPods I got that I had to reset, it’s certainly an issue). That said, we will probably use Notes mode for exhibition-only tours in the future.

Secondly, when your audio tour is this popular bad things happen. We had a few iPods die on us. Three were hard drive failures, and one had a screen fail from abuse. The good news is Apple will replace iPods for free if there is a hard drive failure and the iPod is under warranty. The bad news is the same can’t be said for screen abuse (or any other kind of user created problem). Most of the iPods survived just fine, some had to be reset with a hard reset (getting into the hidden firmware setting to do so), but in the end most survived the ordeal.

The other big challenge was getting people to understand how to use the iPods. Believe it or not there are a lot of people who have never used one before. The Picasso show skewed a bit older as well which added to this. We had a stop on our tour (the first stop) that was all about how to use the iPod and the tour menu itself was as simple as possible (just one list, no submenus), but as with any technology there is still a learning curve involved, regardless of how simple it may seem. Someone will always struggle. It’s important everyone in your museum knows how they work, because anyone, even security guards, may be asked to help someone who’s stuck. This is the most important part to me, because if people can’t figure out how to use your device, there’s no point in having it!

Lastly, as Robin guessed before the show started, ditch the earbuds and get over-the-ear headphones for your iPods. This was a very good move. Nobody wants to stick earbuds in their ears after 20 people before you have!

In related iPod news, we’re getting a few of the new iPod Touch’s in at the end of the month, and I’m currently building an app for it. I think these could have a real impact on audio (and video) tours because of the built in WiFi and browser. I’m pretty excited at the possibilities. More on this soon.

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.

I attened this session and took some notes and added some commentary. Robin was the chair of the discussion, but let the authors/presenters do nearly all the talking.

The first presentation was by Kate Haley, an associate at the Institute for Learning Innovation. Her paper is Cell phones and Exhibitions 2.0: Moving beyond the Pilot State which goes over some findings from a study of Art on Call. In her talk, Haley outlined some of the reasons for choosing phones in museums:

• Removes the cost of infrastructure
• Multi-functional
• Pervasiveness

And some of the things we use phones for:

• Information seeking
• social utility
• affection
• fashion and status
• mobility and accessibility

Haley talked a lot about the barriers to cell phone use in museums. Some of those barriers include:

• Unaware the service was offered
• aware of the service, but unaware of how to use it
• Thought it was pre-paid or cost money
• Assumed cell phone use was prohibited
• Wondered if there was a fee
• not interested in learning more at the moment
• Didn’t find it appealing in a museum context

She also discussed the stages of adoption and how they relate to cell phone use in museums: innovators, early adopters, late adopters, laggards, etc. Haley discussed how this relates to the stages of technological adoption that typically apply to consumer based products, also apply to cell phone use in museums.

The more interesting barrier, Haley says, is the dichotomy of public and private space and cell phone use. People feel like a conversation on a phone is a private thing, yet mobile phones are often used in public spaces. To rectify this, people often change their body language and behavior to stake out public space. They’ll do the following things:

• Close their body position
• Turn their back on others
• Lean forward
• Duck their head
• Staking out space

We’ve seen a similar disconnect in the Walker with Art on Call. While participation by listening to artist and curator commentary is good, visitor participation by leaving comments is low. A gallery is a very public space: it’s open, usually with minimal sound deadening, normally quiet, and lots of other people and security around. Certainly not the intimate space that people typically look for when having a private conversation.

In order to increase usage of cell phone audio tours Haley suggests:

• We need better signage
• We need to acknowledge how people traditionally use their phones and what stage of adoption they’re in. Not everyone is an early adopter
• Acknowledge cultural and contextual differences
• Understand cultural norms on phones and public spaces

The next speaker was Nancy Proctor, from Antenna Audio, presented When In Roam: Visitor Response To Phone Tour Pilots In The US And Europe.

Phone tours are more common in the US than Europe for some of the following reasons:

• Poor reception in many older historic buildings in Europe
• Higher percentages of foreign visitors in Europe
• Higher cost for cell phone usage in museums, many Europeans have pay as you go plans and many Americans have unlimited minutes
• Concern about camera phones in museums
• Concern about social use of phones in museum

Antenna Audio did a comparison of cell phone tours vs. podcasts vs. “traditional audio” tours during the Drawing Restraint show at SFMOMA last fall. For comparison, Proctor showed the podcast version of the tour, which featured background music, high quality audio and an image stream that went along with the presentation. It was presented on her computer through iTunes and sounded and looked pretty good. Then she presented the same tour using the cell phone tour, which didn’t feature the background music or the image stream. Of course, it wasn’t as immersive, but the main kernel of content was still there.

Some conclusions Proctor drew was that the more media the visitor consumes, the more they enjoy the exhibition. The immersive “traditional audio tour” provides this. Cell phone users on the other hand, use a more à la carte approach, consequentially not consuming as much media. The implication is that due to the less immersive experience, visitors do not learn as much. Proctor called the a la carte approach “the google” way of finding out more. The insight seems valuable, but I think we must also consider that not every visitor wants to have everything dictated to them. Art should still leave room for interpretation, after all. Some traditional audio tours can contribute to the herd mentality, where you’re lead on a strict path through an exhibition and can be far from enjoyable.

To Consider: One must be aware of possible bias in Proctor’s study. Proctor works for Antenna Audio, who happens to be a purveyor of “traditional audio tours”. Cell phone audio tours, to a certain extent, threaten Antenna’s business model. Antenna has an interest in limiting the growth of cell phone audio tours. Nancy’s findings seem to have a slant towards showing traditional audio tours as more beneficial to visitor learning. Then again, we at the Walker are prime purveyors of cell phone audio tours and have an interest in encouraging other museums to use cell phone tours.

Q&A

• One commenter noted that the phone is not an interface device, people plan on using a phone for having a conversation, not using it as an interface device. People aren’t prepared to use their phone as an interface device. Haley responded that this is changing. We need to prepare people to use their phone as an interface device, and the social context for this may change over time. Haley also noted that Americans perceive a phone as a tool to make a call whereas much of the rest of the world uses phones primarily as a txt-ing device.
• One commenter suggested that cell phones can’t reach children, as they do not have cell phones. Traditional audio tour devices can be used by the family at the same time. So it can foster family learning.
• Another person questioned the relationship of google-style a la carte learning to the story-telling traditional audio tour approach. Proctor suggests that the more media that we consume, the more we will learn. The comprehensive approach from the traditional tour is more immersive. Haley and Proctor both agreed that there isn’t much data here, though, so it’s hard to know, and learning is hard very hard to measure.
• Another commenter suggested the while cell phone tours aren’t high on audio quality, they can be much more responsive to visitor needs. Cell phone content can be updated very easily. Proctor suggested that audio tours can be updated just as easily (but every device has to be reloaded!).
• Another question was about the subject matter of the exhibition and how it related to take-up of audio tours and cell phone tours. Proctor responded that audio tours tend to be used by frequent visitors, and people who know enough to know they want to learn more.
• The next commenter suggested an that comparing cell phone audio tours to traditional audio tours is an unfair comparison. Cell phone tour content needs to be edited differently, developed differently for each platform model.

I posed the final comment, regarding Near Field Communication, which is the phone technology that may some day allow us to buy a coke from a vending machine with a mobile phone. Yesterday Arstechnica commented on a report by ABI Research about this technology:

NFC technology is what is used to make “contactless payment” for a variety of different services. “Making payments, unlocking doors, downloading content, even setting up wireless networks and many other applications, can all be enabled from an NFC handset,” said ABI analyst Jonathan Collins. “NFC in mobile phones promises a quicker and easier way to execute a host of key tasks by just waving the phone.”

Clearly, there are some possibilities for cell phone tours in museums as well. The ability to simply wave a phone in front of a piece of work and get audio, possibly other types of media, about the work would be extremely valuable as a learning tool. Could museums develop this technology as it emerges, it has the possibility to further evolve the usefulness and accessibility of cell phone audio tours.

The New Media team had a chance yesterday to check out Yerba Buena, a very cool multidisciplinary institution across the street from SFMOMA. I would love to go and catch a performance or a film there, but at the time only the galleries were open. It was an interesting experience to go into an exhibition that wouldn’t be out of place at the Walker — and immediately start looking around for context. It made me realize a bit more how different it is when you work at the institution: we’re surrounded by build-up for months, we can’t help but picking up tidbits of interpretive material and context and stories. I think our audience approaches the show much more like we did at Yerba Buena - “Cool! Um, what?”

Which is why I was so happy to find that they have a cellphone-based audio guide! They’re using Guide By Cell, and the interface is very bare-bones, really just a welcome menu. Some of the audio quality (true with some of Art on Call as well) was spotty and hard to understand, and some of it also sounded like the artist had simply called into the system to record their comments. I love the immediacy of that connection, the ability to rapidly update content, and the informal comments it generates. Very cool.

The other exciting thing for me was their “Shotgun Reviews”: they have several kiosks right in the galleries inviting comments on the exhibitions, and the reviews end up on the web. I didn’t leave a comment so I’m not sure if they’re moderated, but it seemed to have gotten a fair bit of use. I’m not sure if we could pull off a similar concept, but it was refreshing to see that much trust in their users, since that’s been a strong theme at MW2007 so far.

Art on Call is constantly being improved to make it more functional and easier to use. Last month we released a new version with revised scripts and features. The script changes are meant to tighten the call flow and correct problems in the navigation (e.g., callers didn't understand that stop numbers could be entered from the root welcome). The new features--TalkBack and breadcrumbing--take advantage of caller id to capture the stops requested by visitors and allow them to leave their own audio commentary.

TalkBack
The option to record your own comments about a work of art is available after listening to an Art on Call stop. Callers can leave one comment per work and retrieve them by entering their phone number at the website (newmedia.walkerart.org/aoc). By leaving a comment, you’re also giving the Walker permission to share your recording with other visitors. Visitor comments selected by Walker staff will appear in the program and on the website.

Breadcrumbing
Art on Call automatically keeps track of the works of art you access so that after your visit, you can retrieve your stops and find additional information as well as any comments you may have saved. Each time you dial Art on Call from the same phone number, we extend the collection of stops. Like TalkBack comments, your collection of Art on Call stops (should we call this a playlist?) is retrieved by entering your phone number in the search box on the project website (newmedia.walkerart.org/aoc).

A little over a year ago I described AJAX and the work I was starting to research into it. Back then I was calling it RPC (Remote Procedure Call), since I thought it made more sense than the term AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) as we techincally weren’t using XML.

Since then AJAX as a term has become pretty widespread and ubiquitous, as has its impact on the web. Now we can add the Walker to the large list of sites using this technology.

If you head over to our Art on Call website, you may notice a few changes to our stops list. Gone is the long list of stops, and in it’s place is a searchable, sortable, paginated view of our info. All of this happens dynamically without refreshing the page.

The way I went about writing this is a bit different from normal AJAX. With typical AJAX, you request XML data and load it into memory. Then you parse the the XML by various means, either using Javascript to pull data out of nodes, or an XSLT processor built into many modern browsers. The result of course is HTML, which you output to the page to update content when a user requests it.

There are two benefits to the normal approach. One is that it takes any translation processing off the server load and puts it onto the users machine, allowing the server to be more responsive. Two is that it gives you some flexibility in placing lots of data changes all over a page.

But it also has a large downside. Design and implimentation of normal AJAX usually means designing with Javascript. Since you’re front loading everything onto the users computer, actually designing and making changes to data means not only do you need to get the HTML right, but also the Javascript or any other parsing agent you use. This greatly adds to development time and makes maintainability a challenge.

Instead I chose to go a different route, something more in line with the AHAH (Asynchronous HTML and HTTP) method. AHAH could be thought of as a subset of AJAX. There is still asynchronous data exchange, the difference lies in the fact that the data parsing is done on the server and spit to the browser as fully formatted and designed HTML.

This saves a ton of time on coding and mainenance. And given that we’re already using XML/XSLT processing on our servers here at the Walker, it keeps our design process the same as well. Now I don’t have to worry if a display bug is because of badly written HTML or badly written Javascript, I can just design and build the way I normally do and have the page pull in predesigned HTML for the browser to render. It also alows others in our department to update and change the look and feel of our site without having to weed through a bunch of frontend Javascript programming to do so.

This does however make the data slightly less flexible. It’s harder to pull out one tiny bit of data to display in a remote spot on the page (though it still can be done). Our servers are also doing a tad bit more work (however most of the server work is generating the XML from the database, which would happen with either solution). But from a time, maintenance and budget standpoint it’s the right approach.

There’s still a few kinks to be worked out on the Art on Call page, as well as new features to add. These will be available in the coming weeks and should greatly enhance the usability and features of the site. And because we’ve taken this modified approach to AJAX, we’re able to deliver these features in a timely manner.

More on that and some things to watch out for when coding AJAX at a later date.

CultureGrrl gives Art on Call a try and writes a review on her blog. I’m not sure when she actually used the service, but we’ve just recently installed a nifty cellphone signal repeater in the space deepest in the galleries that previously got terrible reception - right next to the Burnet gallery. It’s possible her carrier simply doesn’t benefit from the frequencies we’re repeating (it doesn’t cover them all) but I’m hopeful it was just a matter of timing and the repeater hadn’t kicked on.

As for her other comments, I think some of them will be addressed in the near(ish) future as we start incorporating feedback into the menu prompts. For instance, many people don’t realize you can interrupt the initial prompt by typing in the 4-digit code, effectively skipping right to the artwork you’re looking at. Hopefully that will take some of the hassle out of repeated calls if you can just hit redial, wait for the answer, and then just punch in the code. Much faster.

Anyone else lurking on the blogs have an experience with Art on Call (web or phone) they’d like to share? Leave a comment or link back to this post and we’ll pick it up.

One of the projects Brent and I are working on lately is a facelift to the AOC site - as the number of artworks in the system has grown, the page has become more and more difficult to navigate. Keep your eyes peeled for some fun AJAX paging, better layout, and (finally) a search function.

The biggest problem - and one of the most useful pieces, so we had to solve it - was how to get a single search to look for a keyword in the AOC data as well as the associated Walker exhibition data. Up until now I’ve been using very awkward separate connections to each database to integrate their data, and finally today I stumbled on dblink. Now I can keep the two databases separate but allow them to share queries and data. AOC and Walker, sitting in a tree…

Art on Call also has some upcoming enhancements for the phone-based side of things: a few “interactive” features we’ve been planning since the beginning but only now have time for. Should be really cool.

In my last post about using iPods for gallery tours with Art on Call, I talked about ordering serveral iPod Nano’s that we were going to load up and lend out to the public. I also mentioned how this had its own set of unique problems to overcome. That actually turned out to be a bit of an understatement.

Lending iPods out to patrons is much more involved than just the simple question of how you clean them, or avoiding theft (those items of business are handled by our Visitors Services department). In the New Media world, we care more about answering the question, “how do we make them easy to use?”

Ease of use really comes in two forms. One for the user of the device, and the other for those of us having to update the content on the device itself. When there are budgetary constraints, you’re always looking for the best bang for the buck, while not overly hindering the experience because of it. So what do we do?

The default iPod OS is not good enough.

When you’re using an iPod in a normal sense with MP3s as music, the tags for each song make sense, like artist, album, and genre. When you’re dealing with physical objects, the relationship doesn’t always make sense. Sure, Artist makes senes, but Album? What does that mean to someone looking for audio on “Spoonbridge and Cherry” who doesn’t know who the artist is? Where do they look with the default iPod interface? It’s obvious the iPod interface needs some changes to have it make a bit more sense for museum goers.

iPod Notes (aka “Museum Mode”)

Apple put a feature on the iPod called Notes, which is also referred to as “Museum Mode”. These are files you can put on the iPods data section that point to other files or audio. They’re very simplified HTML and allow you to basically customize the interface. You’re also able to default to “notes mode” so that you don’t see the normal iPod OS choices or are you able to fiddle with the iPod’s settings. Sounds like a great solution right? Well, almost.

One of the biggest problems with Notes is that it breaks the second rule of ease of use. Since they’re just flat HTML text files, creating the directory structure you want takes a lot of hand coding. Notes does not really take advantage of the ID3 tags in the MP3 files. While you can link to a list of songs in genre “X”, you can’t link to a list of all genres and go from there (and if you can, it’s not covered in Apple’s API docs). This means having to rewrite a lot of the basic functionality of the normal iPod through notes mode. It’s time consuming, and every update of audio means an update to the Notes files.

Even if this did work nicely there are other issues. One is that special characters don’t seem to render properly, if at all, in Notes mode, even with the correct text encodings set. The other for me was a real deal breaker. Half the reason to restrict users to Notes mode was to keep people out of the normal iPod OS. However, if you hold the Menu button down for 2 seconds (like you would to go from song info to the main menu in one click), it doesn’t go back to the Notes menu, it goes to the iPod menu! Imagine the confusion of someone holding the menu button down just a tad too long and now staring at a screen that looks nothing like they had seen before! Now we’re back to the same old problems we had in the beginning. So what do we do?

Hack the iPod

Before I tried Notes mode, I had thought about just hacking the iPod firmware to change the menu options in the OS. However, I figured “Museum Mode” would be much easier and then went that route. After my dissatisfaction with that, it was back to researching iPod hacks. This would prove to work well, with only a few drawbacks, and also allowed us to add something that we certainly could not do in Notes mode (at least not easily).

First things first, how do you hack an iPod? It’s actually a bit easier than it sounds, though not without a lot of risks. If you’re not confident with machine code, and don’t follow the directions to the letter you can easily turn your iPod into a 6oz paper weight.

That said, there is a great little program called iPod Wizard, that really helps in the process. The basic idea is you download the latest iPod firmware and load it into iPod Wizard. The Wizard helps you find and change various parts of the firmware, like text, fonts, even graphics. Once your changes are made you save the new firmware and then update your iPod with it. If all goes well you’ve just hacked your iPod and it works great!

The results

In our case we mostly just wanted to change the text. Remember how I said earlier how “Album” doesn’t make much sense in a museum audio tour? What if I changed it to “Artwork”? Then we’d have something people could relate to. We’d just have to make sure each artwork title was mapped into the Album ID3 tag in the MP3 and it would be seamless to the user. Do this for other tags, and you get the following, which is our new iPod interface:

Lets start at the top. “Art on Call” is now the name of the iPod. Next are Artist and Artwork, followed by Location which lists each gallery in the museum, and then Code, which is the Art on Call number code on an artwork. As you can see there are a number of ways to drill down to get to the same content, and it all uses the build in ID3 tagging of the MP3s. Just tag them correctly, upload them and they fall into place. Much easier to make sense of and update!

You may have also noticed “Walker Calendar” in the options. This was what I was talking about earlier in regards to extra features that would be hard or impossible to do in Notes mode. iPod allows you to sync with iCal, and we have already made an iCal feed of our online calendar. So why not put it in the iPod? Here’s what it looks like:

Calendar grid is on the left. The red flags represent days when events take place. Click on a day and get the list of events for that day followed by a detail of the event which is shown in the right image. The great thing about this is because it works with iCal, it’s an auto update. When you plug your iPod in it auto syncs with our calendar feed and updates as we recharge. There’s literally no work to do to add this feature on our part.

Lastly you see an “Information” item on the main menu. This is actually Notes mode. We’ll still use notes for things like info about Art on Call, or perhaps various other info we want to push there.

Downfalls

While this does sound nice there is one main downfall. While you can change the text of the items that appear on the OS, you can’t outright remove some of the options. For example, “Settings” always appears on the main menu, meaning anyone could go in and change them if they wanted. However this was also a possibility in Notes mode as well, given the problems I wrote above.

To try to solve this we used a bit of social engineering that will hopefully help at least keep a few people from mucking around in the options. One was to label Settings to “iPod Settings” to alert people that this is perhaps something they want to avoid. If they do happen to click on it though they’re greated with this message:

Most honest people will recognize the mistake at this point and back out. Those who really feel like fiddling of course can, though resetting the defaults is pretty easy and will be done after each iPod is brought back to the counter after use.

Overall this isn’t the greatest solution in the world, but I feel it works a lot better than the default OS menu or the Museum Mode. Time will tell how patrons feel about it, which is the only real thing that matters in the end. Hopefully we’ve covered our bases.

I'm working on a new Art on Call feature for our upcoming exhibition Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat. Lockhart's media are film and photography, and she uses them to create an intimate portrait of contemporary rural life as experienced by the youth of Pine Flat, a small town in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. With the help of the artist's studio, Art on Call features the children of Pine Flat telling us their stories, revealing the process behind the shoots, and giving an account of what it was like to work with Sharon. To my ear these recordings are magic, nothing profound but a clear reflection of the relationship and trust that developed between artist and subject.

In addition to the children of Pine Flat, Art on Call includes Walker director Kathy Halbreich commenting on the installation and personal reflections on the project. Kathy's comments in combination with those of the kids make a compelling audio addition to the installation. The stops--which will be posted before the opening on April 23rd--can be downloaded or played online by visiting http://newmedia.walkerart.org/aoc/. To listen on the phone, call 612.374.8200 and enter the code from the list below (look for the files tomorrow or Friday at the latest).

1107 Kathy Habreich on Pine Flat
1108 Dakota talks about the film segment Sleeper
1109 Alex on the film segment Hunter
1110 Alex on the film segment Reader
1111 Becky and Katie discuss the film segment Swing
1112 Kassie talks about Lockhart and her collaborator Becky Allen
1113 Katie and Becky talk about their portraits
1114 About Dakota and the photography process
1115 The kids talk about the Pine Flat Portrait Studio
1116 Katie on Matthew

I’ve recently been working on creating what we’re calling a “docking station” for iPods in the galleries. The idea is that people who bring their iPods to the Walker can dock it at this station and download various audio tours from Art On Call to it. Then they can cruise through the galleries and listen to artists and curators talk about said work on their own iPod. It’s really an alternative means to receiving the same info that AOC has. Plus it saves on your cell phone minutes and the recordings sound much better. Choice is good!

I was able to wrangle an old iMac from the IT dept to create a prototype of the station. It’s just one of those old, slow, first gen iMacs with the CRT monitors. Unlike the speedy new G5 iMacs we have in our lobby for web surfing, there’s no “kiosk” verion of iTunes. On the lobby kiosks we use wKiosk, which basically locks the entire system down for us, and, other than a few bugs in the program, works pretty well in this regard. But for an iPod docking station, we need to use iTunes, and as I’ve found out, what we’re attempting to do is not what iTunes, or the iPod for that matter, were built to do.

In essence I had to start from scratch when building this kiosk, as I couldn’t use any of the tricks I did on the lobby kiosks. I’ve got a lot of things covered at this point. I’ve created a user who has permission only to run iTunes. This means they can’t screw up the system or start launching other programs. That’s good! I’ve also been able to turn off things like the music store or music sharing with the “parental” prefs in iTunes. Double good! However, the bad news is they still have most of the control over iTunes as any normal user would. They can edit most of the prefs, quit the app, or even delete all the tracks in iTunes. Not good.

I somewhat have a solution to this. Quitting the app is ok, because iTunes will relaunch automatically when a user connects their iPod. For the other two, I think the solution is to have a master prefs and library file backed up on the machine. If for some reason someone is sneaking around and changes something (which will happen), all you need to do is revert to the master prefs or library. This requires a bit of baby sitting, to check up on the machine every once and a while to make sure it’s running properly, but this would be the case regardless of the tech or how bulletproof it is.

The thing that actually concerns me more than this though is how iPods dock with iTunes when the machine isn’t the user’s own. I need to test this out more, but so far the results seem to be sporadic. It looks like there are a couple of options as to what happens when an iPod is connected. Either there’s an automatic update of content, meaning the iPod will just download whatever is in the library and fill itself up, or it will be set to manual transfer, where you can drag and drop tracks to the iPod manually.

Automatic downloading is perhaps the most concerning for a few reasons. One is that it doesn’t give people the option to select which audio tour they want, and it just gives them everything, something I’d like to avoid. Again, choice is good! However, perhaps worse, each iPod is tethered to a specific libary (usually the users library on their home machine), and when you connect an iPod to a rogue machine, it gives you an alert saying as much, and asks if you want to delete the contents of the iPod and marry the iPod to the new machine.

That’s not exactly a great idea, especially for a user who’s on a trip from out of town and brought their iPod for things other than museum audio tours. There is however the option to cancel this overwrite, in which case, you can then set the iPod up for manual transfer, but it’s not totally clear how to do this to the user (it’s in the iTunes prefs), and you must unmount and then remount your iPod for this change to take place before you can actually begin the manual transfer (too complicated!).

The best thing that could happen is to somehow force the connection to be manual transfer when people connect their iPods. If it is, people can add whatever they want to the iPod without the worry of overwriting whatever they already have on it (assuming the iPod is not full already). The key is going to be testing this out with many iPods to see what sorts of things work and what do not with this set up. Right now it’s the main thing that’s worrisome.

I suppose that’s to be expected. I doubt anyone has really ever thought about using iTunes with Podcasts as a physical delivery method for audio tours to the public, and it’s obvious they were not created to be used in this way. Thus the quest continues on how to make this work in the most seemless way possible.

If anyone has any comments, questions, or ideas (!), please pass them along, I would love to hear about them.

We have some great interviews and commentary from the architects participating in Some Assembly Required and Andrew Blauvelt the curator of the the exhibition. We posted it in mp3 format, podcast and via cellphone on Art on Call. There’s a full listing of information on the exhibition site as well as on the Art on Call page.