I’m just back from presenting at the New Museum Lab event in Amsterdam run by the Nationaal Historisch Museum. My talk was titled ‘Digital Effects: Content, Communities and the Museum DNA’ and whilst I won’t be publishing the slides, one thing that seemed to be of interest to a lot of people was this simple [...]
Entries Tagged as 'User experience'
Multi-lingual machine translation from the footer
October 12th, 2009 7 Comments
There’s been a fair bit of chatter about machine translation of late and so when we noticed that the Museum of London team had rolled out the new Google Translate widget on their website we figured we’d give it a try and follow suit.
So lo and behold, now on the Powerhouse Museum main site you [...]
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Will schools use collection content? The Learning Federation Pilot Report
July 15th, 2009 1 Comment
Over the last 12 months the Powerhouse, along with the National Museum of Australia and Museum Victoria, has been involved in supplying collection data to joint pilot project between the Le@rning Federation (TLF) and the Council of Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD) from March 2008 to May 2009
Museums have always had difficulty preparing material to service [...]
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Fictitional narratives & visitor-made labels – The Odditoreum
July 9th, 2009 6 Comments
At the Powerhouse we’ve just launched something called The Odditoreum. An incredibly low-tech “exhibition” with no technology-based interactive experiences and minimal web presence, The Odditoreum feels remarkable for the level of participation it is engendering. Visitors are actively writing their own labels for the objects and even before launch there was a lot of interest [...]
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A quick QR code update
April 8th, 2009 11 Comments
As regular readers know, we’ve been trialling QR codes and a little while back rolled them on a small selection of object labels in a Japanese fashion display.
I’ve been keep an eye on their usage and some of the continuing problems around lighting, shadows, and low-resolution mobile phone cameras like the current iPhone 3G. So [...]
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Readability – reducing clutter with a bookmarklet
March 4th, 2009 Comments Off
I’ve become a fan of a bookmarklet tool called Readability.
What it does is remove the clutter from a content-rich webpage and optimise it for ‘readability’ (which of course, itself can be customised). Now museums tend to be serial offenders on text-heaviness – we love long text and I’m not one to argue that we should [...]
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Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination opens and is immediately on the web
December 3rd, 2008 3 Comments
Tonight we had the official public opening of Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination.
Already images and videos of the exhibition and the launch, taken by members of the public (”the people formerly known as the audience”) are starting to appear online across the social web.
Here’s photos on Flickr and no doubt tomorrow there will be [...]
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dConstruct ‘Designing the social web’ 5 Sept 2008, Brighton UK
September 6th, 2008 4 Comments
dConstruct in Brighton this year was held in the full glory of an English beachside summer – sleeting rain and gusty winds. Inside the Brighton Dome, 700 web geeks gathered to hear what ended up being quite a mixed bag of presentations from speakers about various aspects of ‘designing the social web’. Light on the [...]
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More powerful browsers – Mozilla Labs Ubiquity
August 27th, 2008 1 Comment
Mozilla Labs has released Aza Raskin’s Ubiquity in an early alpha form. This is a glimpse into a future world of browser technology which brings notions of the semantic web directly into the browser and connects the dots between websites – not from a provider perspective, but from a user perspective.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza [...]
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Next generation of Photosynth-style image interaction – Bundler
August 18th, 2008 Comments Off
Last year there was a lot of buzz around the first demos on Microsoft’s Seadragon and Photosynth, now from SIGGRAPH08 comes this rather splendid update to underlying technologies and concepts.
There is now a lot more ability for users to navigate and tweak their experience of interacting and browsing a 3D scene using miscellaneous 2D [...]
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