english & technology Franchu on 08 Jan 2008 02:03 pm
Interesting UI designs in museums
A week ago I was in Oslo visiting the Nobel Peace Center and saw some interesting user interface designs to improve the user experience in the museum by making it more interactive. In all cases technology simply seems to fade and makes the use of each of the exhibitions natural.
You can see a video of three of the exhibitions that surprised me the most.
The exhibitions that are shown in the video are:
- A virtual book. You can open the cover, and flip the pages that are originally white and the content is projected from the ceiling. The book is interactive as you can get further information on a topic by pointing at it on the book. As it can be seem the movements of the pages and fingers are detected by an array of IR LEDs lightning the surface from above and a camera doing real-time image processing. The LED array looks bright in the video because the camera CCD is sensitive to the IR wavelengths, even if humans are not able to see them thus giving them a totally dark appearance to the naked eye. Does not seem to be very costly to build and for sure is a way of HCI worth exploring for public places.
- Presence conditioned content display. Each of the small LCD screens display the portrait or logo of a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Nevertheless, when you get within reading distance of a screen, the content automatically changes to present facts of the life of the winner that lead to the award. The presence detection is done by an ultrasonic sensor that triggers the change in content from a distance of 30 cm to 40 cm. The sensor can be seen in the bottom of the panel when the video zooms. When the person leaves, the portrait representation is restored.
- Physical sliding bar for video wall. A video wall is implemented with a matrix of 19” TFTs and the different options can be chosen by using a sliding pointer that sits between a pair of screens in the matrix. By placing the slider in front of the text in the screen, the detailed information is brought to the video wall in a dynamic way. All I can say about this is that its simplicity and smoothness left me awestruck.
If you know of any other museum that uses interesting UI designs for the interaction with the visitors, please let me know 
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
