New Media Initiatives

Several weeks ago, Robin posted about the Walker Channel on iTunes U. I am going to follow up on her initial announcement with a more info about the process of designing an iTunes U Page, the preparation of content, and putting content online.

Designing an iTunes U Page

There are a number of different designs for pages in iTunes U. Some institutions that have been in the store for a while have a three column layout. However, Apple has now standardized on a two column layout for iTunes U pages. There options for customizing a page are limited, but not restrictive. Colors for backgrounds, borders, and text can be changed. An overall header image that is 600px by 300px is used on the top of the main page. The downside of a two column layout is that it does not re-size to a smaller iTunes window as nicely as a the three column layout.

Within the main page, you can create separate content groups. We decided to go with three sections: Featured, Exhibitions, and Topics. Within these sections, you create course pages. Each course can be customized with an icon, description, author/instructor, and links. In each course, there can be multiple tabs for different groupings of content. We’re using “Tracks” for most, which are a mix of video and audio content. A few exhibitions courses also have tabs for Art on Call content.

In order to design our site, I ended up doing some of the initial work right in iTunes. I figured out our color scheme and organizational structure, then took a few screenshots of iTunes. The screenshots were pasted together in photoshop, and I layered the header and course images onto it. Thankfully, the iconography choices were straight forward. The exhibitions use images from an exhibition, either artwork or an installation view. For Subjects or Featured courses, the icons are all similar, just using color, pattern, and language changes, each referencing the different artistic program pages that are already on the Walker web site.

Encoding video for the iPod using h.264

The h.264 codec is both amazing and vexing. It has very high compression, good quality, and is a widely supported standard. Working with h.264, especially for devices, can be complicated. Since the 5th generation, iPods have been able to play h.264 encoded video. They can even play 640×480 video and downscale it to their 320×240 screen, which is great since a 640×480 video will look good on a larger screen too. The real trickery with h.264 comes in with profiles.

Most of the time, if you just export a movie from quicktime using h.264, you use the main profile. However, for a device like the iPod, which doesn’t have a fast processor, Apple specifies that you need to use the low-complexity profile. There technical differences are mostly beyond me, but the low-complexity profile drops some of the more advanced hinting and shape features, but will mean a less processor intensive decode process that the iPod can handle.

Getting video encoded into a low-complexity h.264 profile is not a clear process. Apple’s own QuickTime Pro doesn’t let you encode to low-complexity and have any control over the output. If you want to make a movie compatible for the iPod, you must use the Movie to iPod or Movie to iPhone preset. Both of these presets encode at a very high bitrate, which makes for good quality. However, if you have the scenario we have– long movies of not a lot of action–a high bitrate is both filesize prohibitive and not necessary to maintain quality.

Some time ago, we switched to saving all our channel videos in a mp4 file, using the h.264 codec, thinking that it would make them iTunes compatible. We apparently missed the low-complexity part, and discovered that our videos were, in fact, not iPod compatible. This meant we would need to re-encode our video files to make them more useful in iTunes U. I looked at several different pieces of software to do this, but eventually decided upon MPEG Streamclip.

As I noted above, Quicktime Pro would not work for this. I also looked at Compressor, basically the Pro version of QuickTime Pro. Compressor offers much more customizability than QuickTime Pro in terms of codec configuarion and workflow. Compressor, for some reason, takes an inexplicably long time to encode a iPod compatible mp4. On a high-end Mac Pro, encoding a 640×480 was taking well beyond 8 hours. The output look really good, but given that we had 50 files to convert, it was simply not an option, even when using distributed encoding.

I also looked at FFmpegX and VisualHub (now defunct). Both of them are essentially wrappers around FFmpeg, and they produce good results, are very efficent encoders, and let you adjust every setting (almost to a fault). However, FFmpeg suffers from being written to expect a PC gamma of 2.2, and the resulting videos looked considerably darkened when compared to the original.

In the end, MPEG Streamclip worked the best. It offers the same speed of FFMpeg, much of the same control over settings, and deals with the gamma–outputting the a proper video for the iPod. At a bitrate of about 950kpbs, a typical two hour lecture comes in between 450-500 MB, just below the iTunes U limit of 500 MB.

Putting Content into iTunes U

The processes of editing content and putting tracks into iTunes U straight forward, though frustrating, since it involves a lot of clicking and waiting. iTunes has evolved considerably over time, and certainly letting a huge range of users edit parts of the iTunes Music store was not one of the original design specifications. The process is a bit clunky and Web 1.0-style, but it works. Uploading content is done through a browser, which can be a very finicky, especially with large files. After some trial and error, I figured out that setting Firefox as my default browser and using that for uploading worked better than Safari. Safari will time out the upload after a period of time, whereas Firefox keeps on chugging.

Before files are uploaded, they need to be properly loaded with metadata. iTunes U doesn’t let you edit much on the site (just title and artist) so other fields must be filled in on iTunes on your computer before uploading. When you edit the metadata fields, iTunes commits the changes to the movie files itself. When you upload the movie files, iTunes U will pick up on this and display it. One thing I found a little confusing that artwork is not displayed in the store or when you are previewing a file. Apple says that artwork on movie files is used to display on the iPod, but never in iTunes. This is all covered pretty well in the iTunes U User’s Guide.

Despite the time spent figuring out codecs and monkeying around with uploading, we’re very happy to have our content in another venue and excited to keep adding more.

Visitors to the Walker’s Frida Kahlo exhibition have the option of renting a multimedia guide ($6, $5 Walker members). The tour was produced by Antenna Audio whose staff are providing bi-weekly reports on usage. Here’s what we know so far:

• Take-up rate varies widely depending on attendance with the average being 9%. Thursdays are our big day with typically around 22% (Walker admission is free on Thursday nights). Saturdays are also a big day but the take up ratio (.05%) is diluted by Free First Saturday (FFS) attendance. FFS is the Walker family day; we had 4,800 visitors on November 3rd, a large percentage of which were 12 and under.
• The numbers show far more non-members purchase the tour versus members (approximately 20:1). However, once members purchase the tour, they’ve come back multiple times, often with friends and family.
• The 50+ crowd are the folks purchasing the tour. Teens and 20-somethings think they know it all and tend to dismiss it. I wonder how much this demographic might change if the tour was free and/or offered on personal technology.
• Antenna’s new hardware appears to be holding up to public use. By the end of a 6-hour day, the players can get a bit sluggish but they brought in additional units so they can rotate more frequently.
• The comments from visitors continue to be overwhelmingly positive. Some of the quotes we’ve gotten:”Fantastic…indispensable for understanding the heavy symbolism of her work.”"…loved additional visuals on touch screen…” \r\n\r\n”…would have been lost without it…”

  “…numbers next to paintings should be larger…” (Sigh. The labels, always the labels.)

  “Excellent to have optional perspectives on the artist and contextual background on her life and times.”

  “…the order of paintings didn’t jive with the audio and I had to skip all over the place to find where I was supposed to be.” (The tour is random access and some visitors still prefer a more linear tour.)

  “Every exhibit should have these!”

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 found an interesting blog today: Touch. According to the about:

Touch is a research project looking at the intersections between the digital and the physical. Its aim is to explore and develop new uses for RFID, NFC and mobile technology in areas such as retail, public services, social and personal communication.

NFC, or Near Field Communication, in a nutshell is the technology that will some day let us pay for a Coke or pump a parking meeter with our mobile phone. Or, perhaps, wave our phone at a piece of art and hear the Art On Call stop and an image on our phone’s screen. If you’re wondering why a blog about wireless communication is called touch, it is because NFC generally requires very close proximity, often requiring the access card or phone to touch the receiver.

Dig back through the archives, there are some great posts, such as RFID Form Factors and A Graphic Language for RFID. This one is definitely going in my RSS reader.

Photos borrowed from Touch

Silvia Filippini-Fantoni from Antenna Audio promises to give us the hard truth on whether or not museum bookmarking is actually working the way we think it is. I’m intrigued. She quickly moved through some definitions and the how and why of bookmarking, but most of this first part is in the paper.

Does it really work? How many are bookmarking? Four projects resulted in two at 40% and two at 10%, with clickthrough rates sort of across the board. Online bookmarking applications seemed to have the lowest rates of use, but those who used it did seem to return more than once. Physical devices used for bookmarking were more popular.

Why are they bookmarking? Seems like about 50% are “just curious”, but some genuinely want more info. Why are they not bookmarking? Lack of visibility of the feature, unsure what they would be getting from the service,and lack of interest/time. Most interested in the lack of visibility: we have run into this with AOC and Dialog, people don’t recognize features we think are clear. Also some confusion about the terminology of “bookmarking”, and the idea of setting up an account onsite and accessing it later from home.

Is this a “failure”? She says no. People are using it, even if the numbers are low, and they’re seeing repeat visitors. And some of the users who are using it seem to be getting something out of the experience. Also discussed how museums may have focused on the wrong target – bookmarking may not be for the general public, but should be focused on a select group of frequent and specialized visitors. Interesting idea – it seems right, but harder to pitch it?

Bookmarking in the classroom. This reminds me of ArtsConnectEd, she reports teachers are very enthusiastic about the idea of bookmarking artworks online. In this case, the specialized audience is teachers, not the general public — if focused and enhanced with more features, it would have been a killer app. Something to keep in mind as we build ACE2.0.

Summarized by cautioning to have realistic expectations of results, and targeting an audience. Also the importance of keeping the frontline staff informed – two specific cases where a fantastic tool was missed because the frontline didn’t know about. (We used to run into this with Art on Call, although I think Visitor Services is now pretty on top of it now)

We’ve talked in NMI about RFID or bluetooth bookmarking, this was some good information to carry that discussion forward…

The first speaker, Kevin Walker, discussed his research in “museum bookmarking” and ways of extending the visit beyond the walls of the museum. The first exhibition they worked it into basically used kiosks to capture email addresses from the visitors allowing them to receive further information after their visit – something many museums have experimented with to some degree.

Next mentioned an exhibition at the National Cowgirl Museum that allows visitors to record themselves riding a fiberglass horse, receive a ticket with an URL, and later find a video of themselves composited into a rodeo scene. Again, something we approached with our first Dialog Table: users could gather objects and receive a ticket where they could later get an online postcard of their collection.

Location tracking technologies: they’re using bluetooth detection devices to basically tell where people are in the museum. Problems include determining context – they’re standing there, but are they looking at the painting? For his research he added a microphone to an iPod and asked users to report their own location: better data, but it needed more structure.

Now moved into discussing the paper, so go read it. :) He emphasized how the best learning took place as the kids shared knowledge, rather than just taking it in singularly — that by “creating trails” for other users they enhanced their own knowledge. Problems: lack of structure in the trails, and no returning visits online. Next version asked for more structure, and seemed to help narrow the focus.

Interesting: By only allowing 15 seconds of audio, he found that people more carefully constructed their comments instead of rambling — a good point we may apply to our Art on Call feedback feature? I think we’re facing the same “lack of focus”, we may need to be more specific than just asking for “comments.”

Next projects include some technology projects African villages – as yet TBD, but he hopes to apply these findings. Very cool. Take-home message: it’s not about the technology, it’s how you use it. This is one way they’ve had success using technology, but there are more.

In Q&A he gave the idea of possibly converting these “trails” into blog postings and then eventually a community. Interesting thought. Does carrying around a little screen detract from engaging with the actual object? He feels yes, hence his focus on audio: cognitive load.

I just saw Botanicalls at the ITP Winter Show. It is a cell phone information system that connects people and plants. A person can call a plant on their phone and get information about the species of plant and check if the plant needs watering. On the other hand a plant that needs watering or more sun can call a person up and ask for help. When the plant gets successfully watered it calls again to say thanks.