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On-Demand Video + CMS + Interactive Input For Museum?
remolacha writes "I've been given the task of tech chief for a biggish art museum (1,300 m^2, or about 13,000 sq ft) in Spain. The museum's designers want 20 'terminals' that will offer on-demand video and interactive content. The terminals' content will change with the exhibits; many will have touchscreens. More interesting forms of input are planned as well (floor sensors, big buttons). It's all on one floor, and the floors are raised, so I can run cabling and set up floor ethernet jacks. Max cable run is 60m / 190ft. The museum may expand to 4 times its projected size once open, by comandeering other floors in the building. To give an idea of where the designers heads are, they were talking about a massive DVD changer in a closet somewhere. I am thinking an intranet running a web server with a CMS and Flash media server, terminals running Firefox in kiosk mode. I'd love to do everything on Linux. Does anyone have experience with a setup like this, better ideas, or advice?"
Check these guys out: They are specialized in pretty much exactly what you need.
You definitely want to use sound technologies, streaming, etc. Don't underestimate your audience, your average user tends to be really clueless, which means your terminals have to be rock-solid.
Congrats on landing what sounds like a cool project!
maybe hire someone that can do the job?
Ed Tannenbaum at et-arts.com He's been doing museum video for about 25 years.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Get a quote, and buy it. When it doesn't work, scream at the vendor. Leave the tinkertoys at home.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
You may want to have a look at www.ookl.org.uk, a system for engaging people, often kids, in art and museum content. On OOKL, people use mobiles and computers to curate, share and present their own collections of material collected from the cultural venue (or world at large). I think OOKL's story-centric approach is very interesting.
Having been involved in OOKL early on I know all the server tech is Linux based. Give them a call -- they are a friendly bunch!
I've been looking at LinuxMCE for my own home system. It looks like a really good fit for what you want: Media, touchscreen controls, multiple outputs. Plus, it's a thin-client system, so once you decide on a terminal setup, you can repeat ad nauseum.
I would also point out that this may be a good setup for the expansion you're alluding to. For example, you could set up different accounts for either different works or different artists. Log all the terminals in one room to the account under that artist, and you could have the media for all the different pieces queued up on the menu.
Hmmm..if you ever had a Salvador Dali exhibit, you could have some Dark Side of the Moon playing on the sound system...
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
Except for the DVD-player part -- it seems like it would be more reliable and easier to update if you just streamed video off of a hard drive. Some airlines are using Linux-based LCD terminals in every seat back for in-flight entertainment so it is definitely doable. What you want to do sounds pretty similar, just with slightly larger displays.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I did a project like this about 10 years ago for a museum in London. We used pretty much exactly the same technology as you except we used Windows and it was IE in kiosk mode and not Firefox, and it was Macromedia Generator, not Flash Media Server.
Don't worry too much about what technical things the designers are saying, they don't understand the technology like you do and they can only present ideas from the few technical things they understand. As long as the end user sees what the designers want them to see, then they'll be happy. Use the best technology you know how to use.
I would disagree with the poster above regarding using sound technologies. You have to remember that museums can be pretty noisy places, especially during high profile exhibitions and on weekends (if you've been there during working hours on a workday, don't think that's as busy as it gets!). The background noise can prevent a user from properly hearing the audio, and having audio too loud can disturb and irritate other visitors.
Sure, add audio if you think it'll enhance the product but don't make the mistake of having an interface that needs audio to function. Get some of your testers to use the kiosk for the first time without the sound on. if they can't use it then you need to fix that.
Also remember museums are visited by tourists from other countries, you'll probably have to have translations from some of the major languages if your kiosk relies on language to be used (if you use spoken languages, you'll have to have subtitles as well because of sound difficulties)
You might be able to reduce costs if the museum agrees to a sponsorship deal. Manufacturers may be willing to provide the touch screens and/or other hardware if they get a "powered by" logo on the kiosk.
what an assanine response. seeking advice is a sign of humility and merely indicates hes not a pompass ass-hat. its people that assume they know the best way of doing something and damn all the naysayers that find themselves up to their neck in a project where they failed to recognize all the considerations. thats a foolish way to do work. Hes got a fair idea of waht he wants to do and is looking to make sure he doesnt make an epic blunder. his employers arent tech savvy so hes likely under budgeted and is also likely a staff of one. not a good way to cover your bases
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
Because the guy obviously has balls. Cut him some slack, that's how big dreams com to life. Or violently crash and burn, whatever.
Why not just have consumer DVD players adapted for touchscreens, and stick them in kiosks? My day job involves working on a kiosk put out by a division of the Boston Museum of Science, and it's completely self-contained; so is most everything on the floor.
Burn a new DVD for the new exhibit, dump it in the kiosks near it, you're done, no finicky wiring to set up. KISS.
egypt urnash minimal art.
Find out who is going to be creating the content that will be shown, talk to them about their needs as if you care, but really pay attention when they talk about what software they use to do the authoring. then research that and find out what formats it supports. Maybe it's all flash like you said, but if someone is expecting quicktime or silverlight, you'd better find that out now instead of six months from now after you've ordered 100 linux boxes.
The cd/dvd jukebox idea is terrible. Loading a DVD will take more time than anyone is willing to sit around and wait, furthermore what if five people at five different kiosks want to look at content located on 5 different DVDs? That level of DVD changer is way more expensive than management realizes. A big rack of sata disks under control of a NAS server is probably your best bet. Also, I would worry less about RAID and more about being able to quickly cold swap a failed NAS server.
A "would be nice" is a way for people to walk around and interact with the exhibits without having to repeatedly press the "English" or "Spanish" or "French" buttons on each and every touchscreen. I hate that. They should be able to just grab an rfid token out of a bucket and walk around...and the whole place seems to be in their native language. Hey, maybe have a mic and the kiosk listens for common words in each language and acts accordingly.
Museums swap exhibits in and out fairly often. Have some low-effort way for the curators to swap the kiosk content to match. Maybe the content is tied to an inventory number and the curators can just enter a (semi) admin password, then the inventory number and set the default content right there. the general idea is that the last thing you want is to have to spend the rest of your life assigning content to kiosks.
I'd look into something wireless for the floor sensors/big buttons, like hacking into a bluetooth mouse. Then the curators can move things around a bit, change batteries, even redo the pairing if they want to move buttons between exhibits.
If you're thinking 100 or more kiosks in the long run, I'd look into PXE booting or similar just to avoid any OS install/upgrade/patch labor being multiplied by 100.
Firewall! Last thing you want is some 2 y/o kid to type some random museum words like "nude" or "maplethorp" into a browser and get 20M pages of confusing things on google images while their prudish american parents have a little conservative republican freak out.
Best of luck with this. In spite of the tone of my comments I'm quite jealous. This sounds like one of the most fun projects anyone could ever get!
Hello,
I highly recommend "Ideum." (http://www.ideum.com/) They are based near Albuquerque, New Mexico and specialize in EXACTLY that sort of thing. I interviewed with this company during a job search I went through a few months ago, but after receiving an offer I decided to work with another small company that provided a better offer instead. Ideum has some cool table top, and desk top museum exhibits in place for major museums already. The founder, Jim Spadaccini, is an extremely friendly and nice guy.
They have a general software framework in place built using ActionScript and C++ to make building custom, interactive, touch-screen programs very fast. Their process was quite impressive, and seemed well designed to segregate the work between the hard core coder and the hard core artist in order to quickly make an impressive exhibit. One of the coolest products they were developing was called "GestureWorks." It is designed to make programming multi-touch displays very easy in ActionScript. As a programmer, I can add an eventListener to an object for "throw away" or for "click and hold."
If you give them a call, tell Jim that Brian Stinar referred you! If he gets busy enough, maybe I'll get a consulting or contracting gig on the side out of it.
I hope this help,
-Brian J. Stinar-
Don't hire an IT company. This is not primarily an IT job.
You want someone who can design interfaces, design interesting exhibits and instructional interactivities, and who can work with technical people to make it happen.
this raises an interesting consideration. you'd want to be sure that your implementation will draw people to the art, not your exhibit display. i know that stage is still down the road, once you've decided on a framework for delivering content, but keeping things low-key can carve a nice little niche whereas if your work draws too much attention curators could easily say, "this competes with the art, we want it out" and you'd possibly end up "out" with it.
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
HP has thin clients built specifically for this purpose. They run Debian 4.1.1 with KDE 3 and can be integrated with touch screen.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
The DNA Lounge in San Francisco, run by Mozilla and XEmacs' one-time developer and hacker Jamie Zawinski, has done some similar things. You can check out their code and documentation here:
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/
In short, he's created secure Linux internet kiosks, streaming broadcasts, cameras, and scripts to automate much of it - in short, what you're trying to do but in nightclub form.
I can't count the number of museums I've visited where the whizbang kiosks/interactive displays/demonstrations were out of order. From the lowliest county historical society exhibition to the Smithsonian in DC. Whatever you do, keep an up-to-date set of troubleshooting and repair procedures as you go along. Something easy to follow so that even a simpleton volunteer will be able to get the thing back up and running.
I used to make kiosks for museums and other public areas. Do not underestimate how much abuse these things get from the public. I would highly recommend researching kiosk enclosures and ensuring that the hardware, touch screen and pc, will fit in whatever enclosure suits your needs best. Our kiosks were constantly moved around. Access to ethernet wasn't always an option so we often went wireless. Many times we would develop software so that it stored all content locally on the kiosk. We would create an admin program that would push any content changes to the devices. The devices were then able to run even if the network/internet went down. It also gives you a speed boost since you aren't streaming 20 video feeds across ethernet/wireless. Try finding a local interactive media company that has kiosk experience. It will save you headaches in the long run, even if you only pay them to meet with you once or twice to hash out your ideas and ask for recommendations.
I work in the area of digital signage and narrowcasting (wow.. 2 buzzwords ) and we do the odd kiosk project, simply because our main knowledge center is content and how to deliver it..
From my experience there are a couple of things you need to do:
Go central. If it needs to be managed later on, you don't want ton run around swapping DVD's just to find out someone made a typo and do it all over again ( not talking about the enviromental choice of needing to burn disks on every content change)
Plan for the future.. DVD is good these days but it won't be long before everyone is demanding their neanderthaler videos in Full HD 1080p thank you very much (-> 6 Mbps at least).. running some cat 5e with 1 Gb Full Duplex will NOT get the content to those 20 Clients. Streaming might be an answer but you should test this (and with a real setup, not just hooking up 1 client and opening an HD file)
Find a good kiosk builder. As someone else said here before: these things get abused A LOT. We also do kiosks on streets which is a nightmere but even kids in a museaum with guards in it can do major damage to the machinery in the blink of an eye.
Use the right software and protocols. Don't go opensource because it's opensource. Don't remove features from your list because only commercial products offer it. Use a protocol that is designed to handle these kind of loads of content (HTTP was never designed for serving up files of 100's of MB's.. it can do it, but there are more efficient methods. Find out which one suites your project best. (could even be streaming it with VLC)
You could even consider building a software yourself if your needs are too specific
And if you can, hire a professional to check the dots before implementing. I've been in IT for a long time but nothing i have ever encountered preparred me for my current situation with audio / video solutions. it's not like apt-getting MythTV and off you go..
Believe it or not, the function is the most interesting part of design something new.
I've designed both AV systems and content management systems but to this point have found no pliable way to fit the "dream system" into my work.. None of the above recommendations are going to be a solution on their own, you need to design a 'system' made up of complimentary components to create something that is greater than the sum of it's parts. Be it turn-key or bespoke. the 'use flash/silverlight' question and others like it are completely irrelevant until you know how it's going to work overall in a practical sense. Form follows function.
Some quick conceptual ideas..
- A system that handles multiple media formats and can transcode, most likely via a seperate encoding server. Sorenson Squeeze as a concept is a good start, using preconfigured profiles and drop points etc.
- A system that is open to input by a variety of people, both internal and external parties (e.g. staff, external academics, students, and so on). This sort of functionality would provide an open 'wiki' digital content atmosphere to building application specific knowledge resources. This also, if done successfully would provide unlimited interest from third parties.
- A system that is available via a variety of platforms that are commonly accessible and woud act as a natural pathways form existing media reserves. E.g. public web page for uploading content to a specific museum attractions, library ISBN recommendations and so on.
- A system that allows web based media editing, primarily for formatting 'quick-dump' content to make it either suitable for delivery or contextually palatable. See Kaltura for inspiration.
- A system that delivers content to a physical identifiable location in the museum. It should be as simple as 'tricerotops' content arriving in a 'tricerotops' folder and being picked up from there by a mini pc or slim client.
- A system that allows for scheduling and composing of digital presentations. NEC panel director shows a good example of practical back end functionality.
- A system that allows dynamic touch based content call up by museum participants at the exhibit itself. A simple split screen web page with sub-topic content menus and a running presentation would work.
- Or even better, wireless touch tablets with RF/bluetooth proximity link to each exhibit, dynamically loading content as the person moves around the museum. Choose a rugged model, make people sign for it and throw an RF tag with beepers at the exit, done.
- Humanize the entire process.
I can not stress enough the importance of designing the function and feature set before you choose a technology path and allow yourself to be swayed by personal or community bias (it's easy to stick with what we know and swap to function follows form). It's about the user first, the content second, everything else comes third.
Either way, enjoy. :)
The Newport Aquarium (across the river from Cincinnati) has an interesting interactive display in the jellyfish exhibit. A 15' video of floating jellyfish is projected on the wall (just a plain white wall). You can bump the jellies with shadow gestures to make them change direction. It's intended to be completely non-contact, but little kids still end up pounding on the wall.
A nice mix of wow factor and secure hardware (except for the poor wall).
For the life of me, I can't remember what the system is called or find it with Google. The closest I can find is http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/14/microsoft-touchwall-can-inexpensively-turn-any-flat-surface-into-a-multi-touch-display/
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