[Side Note: It’s all been a bit quiet on my website the past few months. As with most people – having a quiet website is actually a sign that they’re really busy. My main excuse is the arrival of a ‘little person’ but I’ve also been speaking at conferences, teaching touch-table development and working on a host of exciting projects. I’m going to try to get the website up-to-date in the next few weeks.
WTF is a Diptych? 🙂 Just incase you’ve not come across it before. It generally used in the art world to refer to a pair of images that complement each other in some way. You might be more familiar with it’s more popular bigger-brother the Triptych. These are three panel paintings, and a famous example is the Francis Bacon work Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
This is something I’ve been keen on for a while – having people who use the table actually build something. Perhaps something they can take away physically or digitally. Generally these ideas have been things like curate their own exhibition, create a customised newspaper or create a top ten of favourite people / things.
Touch tables are fantastic for not only viewing photos, but also for manipulating them. So a natural fit is a collage application – although it’s taken me a while to get round to building on.
If you’ve not seen VanGoYourself before – stop reading right now and go check it out here. Definitely a fine example of ‘the best ideas are the simplest ideas’. The tagline is pretty much covers it: “recreate artwork with friends”.
It’s a website with classic (copyright free) works of art which you then use as inspiration to recreate yourselves. But… this doesn’t really do it justice. How about “Collaborative engagement with art in a social context” but I didn’t use the buzzwords “deep, meaningful connection”.
Photos always work fantastically well on large touch tables. They are natural for even a novice to handle, can be moved, expanded and generally just passed around. With the right content conversations between users comes automatically.
However there are two problems with this – curating the content in the first-place and secondly ensuring the content remains fresh. I’ve thought for a long time that you could solve both these problems if you connected to an existing ‘stream’ of photos – something like ColorizedHistory on Reddit or HistoryInPics on twitter.
Introduction “Agent in a Box” (AiaB) is a project I’m working on with Katie Day of The Other Way Works and Alyson Fielding of Pyuda. It can be thought of as a prequel to Black Tonic, an existing Interactive Theatre Experience developed in 2008 by The Other Way Works.
It was originally envisioned as a single player, time-limited experience for the intended audience of a business traveler, trapped in a hotel away from home.
Introduction This project is based on an idea to build a budget-version of the ‘Star Trek Holodeck‘. This is not a particularly novel idea – it’s been the holy-grail of Virtual Reality for the past 30 years! There are a number of people working with a variety of tracking devices and budget virtual reality equipment to produce similar solutions. This version uses external infra-red cameras for tracking and the Oculus Rift for the headset.
Introduction On the 3rd September 2013, the new Library of Birmingham (LoB) opened and became Europe’s largest public library. As part of the Digital Heritage Demonstrator project we collaborated with the LoB staff to develop a novel touch table experience for the general public that showcases their varied collections.
The LoB is the custodian of a number of important archive collections. These include Wingate Bett Ticket Collection, Parker Children’s Books Collection, Great Western Railway Collection, USA postcard collection, Song Sheets and Silent Movie Scores Collection and numerous photographic collections.
Introduction This work was a collaboration with Jez Collins who runs the Birmingham Music Archive (BMA). The project was to investigate whether it would be possible to build an Audio Tour guide based around the music heritage of Birmingham.
Birmingham Music Archive is an online resource that celebrates, preserves and shares Birmingham’s rich Music Heritage. Content includes photographs, ticket stubs, audio clips, videos, stories etc as described here:
_“_We believe music provides us with memories, individual and shared experiences and self expression.
Introduction In October 2012, Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries, launched their £8.9 million
refurbished gallery ‘Birmingham, its people, its history’. As part of this refurbishment, the Digital Heritage Demonstrator project, developed a bespoke application for a custom 65″ Touch Table, based around the museum’s content.
The entire gallery spans over 500 years of Birmingham history from medieval times and the industrial revolution, through to the World Wars – to the technology-led life of the 21st century.