Interactivity for Museums

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ART&COM's interactive tables for museums and showrooms around Europe.
 
By Dr. Joachim Quantz, Director Business Development, ART+COM Technologies GmbH
 
Over the past five years ART+COM – founded in Berlin in 1988 by designers, scientists, artists, and technicians – has realised more than 20 interactive tables for museums, showrooms, visitor centres, and trade fairs. All table installations are operated by a touchsensitive surface that allows a direct, informative and playful exploration of information. Based on the experiences gained in these projects, ART+COM developed the ART+COM Touchmaster, a large scale multitouch presentation system, as a standard product in 2008. Interest in and demand for interactive tables is growing constantly as technology and applications become more and more robust and straightforward to develop and deploy.
 
In addition, the usage of media has become a popular instrument to transfer knowledge in the context of exhibition design. The first interactive table designed and developed by ART+COM was the 'floating.numbers' project commissioned by the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2004. Its surface, spanning nine metres in length, displayed a mass of numbers flowing in a continuum.Individual digits appear randomly at the surface of this stream of numbers and, once touched by a visitor, surrender their secrets in text, pictures, films and animation. Shortly afterwards, ART+COM developed two multimedia installations for the ‘Tutankhamun – The Golden Thereafter’ exhibition at Bonn’s Artand Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany. One installation studying the Nile Valley and its key sites consists of a table top covering an area of four and a half square metres, illustrating the course of the Nile River. The touching of any riverside location by a visitor revealed cultural and religious information in graphics, texts and animation. One year later the city of Kassel assigned ART+COM to present the ‘documenta’ exhibitions in mobile form through digital media.
 
Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the world’s largest art exhibition went on tour in a 15-metrelong truck with an interactive table stretching over eleven metres set up inside. The next project employing the ART+COM multitouch technology had its premiere at the London Science Museum in October 2005: The exhibition ‘The Science of Aliens’has been staged in science museums in North America, Europe and Asia since then. For this show, ART+COM created a whole interactive room where visitors could get in touch directly with aliens. The creatures living on the planets, ‘Aurelia’ and ‘Blue Moon,’ are generated in real time and move dynamically through virtual landscapes.Visitors can not only watch the aliens but also influence the creatures’ behaviour and actions by interacting with them via the touch-sensitive surface of two metres width and about seven metres length. For the Dutch gas group Gasunie, ART+COM designed and realised a company presentation in 2006. On more than seven square metres an interactive touch-sensitive map of the Netherlands is shown, depicting the network of gas pipelines – one of the biggest in Europe – with which Gasunie energises the country. Intersections, blending stations as well as other work and storage facilities are marked in red on the map and, after being activated by the visitor, disclose information in text and images.

In the following year ART+COM developed and realised the ‘Produkt Info Center’ (PIC) for the BMW Welt in Munich. At the so-called ‘Info Tables,’ customers are presented with a 3D-rendering of their car. Via a touchsensitive tabletop surface, the BMW customer adviser demonstrates the car’s features based on individual customer data. In order to picture the vehicles one-to-one, the application processed data which was delivered directly from the BMW production site.
 
The real time renderings with 30 images per second are based on ART+COM`s Y60 Software. Likewise based on the multitouch technology, an interactive genealogy table was installed in the Museum of Natural History Berlin within the scope of redesigning four exhibition halls in 2007. Placed in the hall ‘Evolution in action’ it allows visitors to gather information on the derivation of animals.
 
At the same time ART+COM developed the interactive installation ‘The Football Experience’ for the Belgian football club KRC Genk‘s stadium (Cristal Arena). A life-sized, heavily-stylised figure of a football player was placed on a table surface. When visitors touch different parts of the body, they learn what injuries football players suffer. Four positions around the figure independently allow access to the information so that several football fans can playfully enlarge their knowledge at the same time.
 
Predicated on these project experiences, ART+COM developed the ART+COM Touchmaster as a standard product in 2008. The Touchmaster is a large scale multitouch presentation system – so far the only one of its kind. Several users can access media applications simultaneously and independently of one another. Unlike multitouch screens, the images are projected onto a borderless table top. The result is a crystal clear image of up to two metres length and a metre width over the entire surface. The system is operated via a touch-sensitive interface – direct and intuitive, without the need for a mouse, buttons or a keyboard – based on the ART+COM Proximatrix 400. This technology employs a proximity sensor system with 400 readings per square metre and can be integrated into all wooden, plastic or ceramic surfaces with almost no limits to size or format.
 
Magic Touch
 
The Touchmaster can be used as a stationary or mobile system. Complicated installation is no longer needed; the technology remains in the background.‘Tactile’ content and the interaction itself take centre-stage and constitute the Touchmaster as the ideal presentation system for locations with large numbers of visitors and settings offering a hands-on experience.
 
ART+COM continues to design and develop interactive tables based on the Touchmaster standard format as well as customised shapes, designed specifically to meet customers’ individual requirements. In 2008 and 2009 ART+COM realized standard tables for Otto Bock (trade fair, science centre) and Bombardier (trade fair) and customised tables for the BMW museum (12 metres long and three metres deep, displaying the companies 90 years of history), for B.Braun (visitor centre), for the Ozeaneum in Stralsund and for the Berlin town hall (Be Berlin campaign, an interactive Berlin map in the actual shape of the Berlin city layout).