Two new apps on old topics

Two of my favorite museum apps of late aren’t groundbreaking in the sense that they cover new topics or modes of interactions. In fact, they’re downright old-fashioned in terms of their content, if you can wrap your mind around the idea of an old-fashioned app. I like many things about these apps, but the reason I wanted to share them was that they both a stellar job of doing that thing that museums talk a lot about, but rarely manage to do; namely repackage existing content and design a new experience for a new medium (in this case, the iPad) that is both true to the original and feels like a custom-made iPad app, and not a retread of something that was probably cooler in the original.

1) Minds of Modern Mathematics
by IBM and the Eames Office

In 1961, IBM and the iconic designers Charles and Ray Eames presented “Mathematica: A World of Numbers… and Beyond” to the new California Museum of Science and Industry. It was the first of many exhibitions the Eames would create for IBM, and Mathematica would become so well-known that IBM would eventually create additional copies that were starring attractions at several U.S. science centers over the next five decades.

Five years after the opening of the Mathematica exhibit, IBM and Eames created “Men of Modern Mathematics” an enormous timeline of mathematical and scientific history. Copies of this timeline were added to Mathematica and posters were perennial favorites of museum shops and math department offices for years.

The Mathematica exhibit at the Museum of Science, Boston from Flickr user davepatten

To celebrate Ray Eames’ centenary, Eames Office and IBM again joined forces to take the content in the timeline and make an app out of it. The result is “Minds of Modern Mathematics” which is billed as a multimedia exploration of the history of mathematics

The timeline. It's busy, yo!

The Eames, perhaps best known to designers for their chairs and to dorks for “The Powers of Ten” film they made, were instrumental in creating the mid 20^th century American aesthetic, partly for their willingness to engage in any medium they fancied; architecture, interior design, furniture, filmmaking, museum exhibitions, etc…

The surviving Mathematica exhibitions are practically artifacts themselves, living embodiments of the Eames’ design mind. They were also masters of content development, as this app makes clear.  If you’ve ever stood in front of one of the “Men of Modern Mathematics” timelines, you can appreciate why its so hard to make a good timeline. They take a (literally) gigantic amount of historical content and somehow make it all tell the story they want. It’s a hypertextual experience in physical form. Your eye can skip and jump from node to node, backwards, forwards, up, and down, as you explore math and its connections to everything going on between 1000-1950.

The app manages to capture the feeling of that experience, while rendering it in a format suitable for the iPad, which takes advantage of the affordances of the iPad in a way think Ray and Charles would’ve enjoyed. Each person or event on the timeline has both text and images and links to more information on the web.  The app changes the user interface depending on whether you’re in landscape or portrait orientation, a la Biblion. And best of all, it collects in one place the short films the Eames made for the exhibition on one screen. The Math Peep Shows are classics of educational media. Concepts like scaling and size, exponents, and other mathematical esoterica are explained and explored in a decidedly whimsical fashion.

The Timeline of "Minds of Modern Mathematics"

Leibniz’s biography. Note the Wikipedia links.

The Eames’ Math Peep Shows, in all their 1960s glory!

Get “Minds of Modern Mathematics” at the iTunes Store

And for extra credit, here’s Ice Cube, celebrating the Eames’ contribution to architecture. Watch it. You won’t be disappointed.

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2) Color Uncovered
by the Exploratorium

Any app that instructs you to drip water on your iPad is OK by me! “Color Uncovered” delivers an app (though they call it an “interactive book” that captures the Exploratorium’s signature style of science experimentation in an incredibly polished and well-designed package.

The Exploratorium description of how an iPad screen works. Priceless.

The Exploratorium is justly famous for their style of exhibition design. Their Cookbook series of books have provided ideas and inspiration for countless science educators and museum builder the world over. And if you’ve ever used an Exploratorium exhibit, this book will feel immediately familiar. Each page starts with a color phenomenon and then unpack that phenomenon using essays, simple interactives or video to make their point.

One of the interactives that require you to use a real world prop.

Get “Color Uncovered” at the iTunes Store

So what do these apps do well?

Both these apps do a great job of taking existing content and delivering it in a new way through the new medium of an Internet-connected tablet. Although both of these apps contain content that already existed, neither is just a repackaging or “repurposing” of existing assets. Each app stands on it’s own as a satisfying tablet experience. That’s the lesson I’ve taken away from playing with both apps. Having great content is not the key. Great content helps, but it’s not enough to guarantee a successful experience, nor is simply copying the original, successful format. Careful design is what makes these apps both feel so pleasurable to use. Writing this has already gotten me thinking about what similar kinds of experiences we’ve got that could be translated in a similar fashion.

Reviews: museum game apps

I got a lovely email last week from the people working with the Tate to announce their newest game app, “Race Against Time.” As I was downloading it, I remembered that Dave Schaller had sent me a link to Eduweb’s latest game app “Moon Walking”. Must be time to tackle games again.

This past Summer I wrote a series of four posts on gaming and museums.  It covered interactivity, the qualities of good interactives, games and play, and finally “gamification” the process of applying game principles to non-game activities.  Now, there’s a growing crop of museum games you can try out to see what’s possible.

Apps as ways to fill interstitial time
Somebody wise said the killer apps for mobiles is that they are a way to kill time while waiting for the bus – those down times that occur while we’re between places, or waiting for something to happen are a great time to engage an audience. Three of these games fit that bill.

Race Against Time

Tate’s latest game, possesses the same irreverent spirit that animates Tate Trumps, their first game.  In it, you play the part of a color-collecting chameleon, out to save the world from having all its colors sucked up by Dr. Greyscale.  Along the way, you traverse 12 decades of modern art in the background.

Race Against Time is a classic sidescroller (think “Mario Brothers”) where you gobble up color while avoiding perils and enemies. The concept is pretty simple “Don’t get killed.” I will confess I’ve been unable to get past the Fauvists before getting killed.  You can play the game anywhere, and there’s no benefit I can see to playing it in the Tate.

Meanderthal

Meanderthal is one of Smithsonian’s most appealing apps in my opinion.  It’s another dead easy app in terms of functionality; you take your picture using the phone’s camera, choose a human ancestor and presto, the images are combined to make you appear Neanderthal. You can also learn about the three early human species presented in the app, but clearly the thrill lies in having your picture morphed.

What I like about Meanderthal is that it is a great snack. It does one thing and does it very well. And you actually learn some paleontology along the way. It’s got rudimentary social features like email and Facebook sharing, and it actually uses a built-in feature of a mobile – the camera – which is still surprisingly rare in museum apps.

MoonWalking

An app that goes a bit further in using the mobile platform’s advantages seems to be Eduweb’s augmented reality (AR) app MoonWalking. This app lets you overlay scenes from the first Moon landing over wherever you happen to be at the time. Thanks to GPS positioning, you can walk around Tranquility Base and use your mobile as a window into real-time recreations of highlights of the mission.

What I like about the concept behind this app is the potential it has for heritage sites, or anywhere out in the world where you might want to overlay digital content on what you’re looking at. A ruined castle could be restored, an archaeological site become a living settlement. And it is best done with a mobile device. How well MoonWalking works in the wild I can’t say. My iPhone is too old and my iPad doesn’t have 3G so I can’t get the app to work.

LaunchballI think Launchball actually predates mobile apps. This simple physics simulator-meets construction set game was launched as a website (how old school is that?) back in 2007 to much acclaim. It won awards at Museums and the Web and some other conference called SXSW, where it picked up Best Game and Best of Show awards. In 2009, it was released for iOS and is available for iPhone.

UPDATE: Mia Ridge clarified the development history for me. Thanks, Mia!

@erodley good piece! FWIW, Launchball was developed in-house and with an agency and based on Launchpad gallery experience. Mobile diff ppl—
Mia (@mia_out) January 11, 2012

NOTE: Apparently, Science Museum and the game’s developer are renegotiating contracts, so the game has been taken down from the App Store temporarily.  Try the original Flash version to get a sense of it’s addictive gameplay.

What I like about Launchball is the extent to which it works as a great game, and as a museum game.  It lets you play loads of levels, but it also lets you build your own, and share your creations with the Launchball community. First and foremost, it’s a good game. Second, it does a great job of getting you to experiment and engage in the “I wonder what would happen if…” thinking that’s an essential prerequisite to learning how scientists and engineers think.

Apps as ways to encourage visitors to pay attention in the museum

All the games I’ve mentioned thus far could be done anywhere. Nothing about them requires a museum visit, though you probably would never find them unless you were at that museum and saw a sign directing you to download the app.

Tate Trumps

Tate’s most well-known app, Tate Trumps, behaves differently than the apps above. It was originally designed to work in the Gallery, and has been updated to work anywhere. Like the title says, it’s a way to play a simple version of the card game trumps, only the cards are various artworks at the Tate.

In each of the three different games that make up Tate Trumps, you pick a hand of cards that are Tate artworks, that have attributes, some mundane like “size”, and others wildly subjective like “strength”.  When you assemble a hand, the game picks a suit, and the players try to put out their highest card with that attribute. Winner gets points, player with most points at the end of seven hands wins.

Tate Trumps is a brilliant piece of work in my opinion. It has multiple modes of gameplay. You can play it alone, or with your friends. The attributes are strange enough that they got me to look at the artworks differently than I would’ve on a more typical visit. In Collector mode, you add artworks by going around the gallery, typing in ID numbers off the object labels, “collecting” the pieces you want before your opponents can get them. And it’s connection to the Tate is crystal clear. It’s a game that only Tate would’ve made.

So what can these games teach us?

As I said in my previous app review, trying to synthesize learning from such disparate experiences is a challenge, but there are some things that rise up when I look at these games.

Good games are fun.
Seems like a no-brainer, but as you know, so many “educational” games are educational first and games second (if at all). They’re really gamified (ack) interactives, and they usually suck. If it’s going to be a game, it has to be a game first.

Be in for the long haul
Tate Trumps is on version 5, and has not only fixed bugs, but added major new functionalities as time has gone on. That means the business model has to be a software development model with new version releases and point releases, not a museum exhibition, “Build it and it’s done” model.

Success has costs
I doubt anyone at Science Museum could’ve predicted that Launchball would have such a long life, and morph from being a website to being a mobile app. And whatever agreement they originally had with the developers, I bet it didn’t include this contingency.

Things you can only do with a phone make more appealing apps
Almost all of these apps use the mobile platform to do things you couldn’t do any other way. Using the camera, communication functions, GPS, etc… all make the experience more compelling because it’s obvious that you could only do this with a mobile.

What museum game apps have you played and enjoyed?

Reviews: four apps that look at objects

Over the holidays, between parties, blissful bouts of relaxing, and a bit of food poisoning, I’ve been catching up on apps I meant to look at but haven’t found time for.  In this post I want to discuss four apps worth examining that all try to get users to look at objects and use the tablet platform to extend that experience.  And then maybe, there’ll be questions about apps creating virtual analogues of a physical experience.

The apps in question are:

1. The University of Virginia Art Museum’s “UVaM” app,
2.  MoMA’s “Abstract Expressionism NY,”
3. The American Folk Art Museum’s “Infinite Variety: Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts”,
4. and a non-museum example, Pyrolia SA’s “Road, Inc.”

They run the gamut from pilot project to high-end, big budget custom developed project. What links them is that they all try to use the tablet platform to get you to do engage in a fundamental museum experience: looking closely at objects. And to a surprising extent, they all managed to get me to do it.

1) UVaM

The smallest of the apps in scope is a pilot project undertaken by UVA to expand on their efforts to expand access to their collection through their Object Study Gallery, a cross-cutting display of objects from a variety of cultures and time periods. To do this, they partnered with a company called Arqball, who describe themselves as “a platform for publishing rich interactive 3D content on mobile phones and tablets.” And 3D digital scans of eighteen objects form the backbone of this app. You can rotate high-res images of objects with a swipe, zoom in to inspect details, and access fairly lengthy curatorial descriptions of the objects.

Likes
The graphic design is minimal and clean and lets you focus on the objects. The objects that have extra images embedded in their descriptions are all large and zoomable as well.

The interface design is excellent. I never seemed to be more than one tap or swipe away from what I wanted. Because of the limited scope of the app, it has a pretty flat navigation scheme. You swipe left or right until you reach one end or the other.

The image resolution suits the objects. Part of it may just be clever object selection, but objects in the app are all displayed at good resolutions, and respond well to swiping and zooming. At max zoom, you can see the image start to fall apart, but I think that’s actually useful, a sort of visual “Here’s the limit” clue. I am also the sort who will zoom as far as possible, just to see what I can see.

The texts are long, but not off-puttingly so.  I might make the paragraphs a bit shorter, but… One nice feature of the text is that the image doesn’t go away when you swipe down. It moves to the top of the screen and only moves off-screen when there’s another image in the text that you might want to enlarge.

Dislikes
I like a landing page that sets you up for the experience. A signed letter from the Director as the intro? I’d rather launch into instructions and let this information not be the thing I see every time I launch the app.

The rationale behind the eighteen objects is unclear to me. I have no sense of what the collection is like from which they were selected.  It might be a case where I’d understand it all if I were in the museum, but as I’m not, it feels random.

Having only one orientation seems like a bug. The objects they’ve chosen are all taller than they are wide, but I’d still like to be able to rotate the tablet and have the app reorient itself.

On the whole
I thought this app was a great pilot. It demonstrated how an app that lets you look at 3D scans of objects might look, and it left me wishing there was more.  This is also the downside of pilots. Will there ever be a more comprehensive version?

Takeaways
Doing one thing really well can be enough to make a free app worth trying out.

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2) Infinite Variety: Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts”

The American Folk Art Museum partnered with Toura to produce this app.  It got a lot of interesting press when the show opened (like this one from Simon Schama in ft.com) because the unusual exhibition design from Thinc Design made traditional labeling impossible. Quilts were hung in towering cylinders and arcs, many meters above the ground. Having an app a visual field guide was an interesting choice, and I still wish I’d seen the show while it was up.

What the exhibition looked like. By Gavin Ashworth

This app is very much in the vein of an old school multimedia guide. It exists to help you make sense of the physical space and identify quilts at a great distance to learn what the curators have decided to tell you about them.  It seems to be built with Toura’s MAP platform, which lets museums build an app from templates in relatively little time. Sometimes, it feels like a little off-the-shelf, but on the whole, the developers made great use of the platform.

Likes
Navigation by images rather than numbers or names is very pleasing.  I’m finishing off our first Toura app, and I so wish I could come up with a better method than the little card with the number… Maybe next time.

The addition of a whole “Post Exhibition Materials” is a very smart move, especially since the exhibition was only up for less than a week.  After the initial viewings of the quilts, I spent most of my time here, looking at installation photos, timelapse videos of the installation of the show, and videos of programming from the exhibition.

Dislikes
The navigation really only works in portrait mode. I was getting really frustrated with my inability to find any quilts in landscape mode. It was only when I accidentally turned my iPad that the screen rearranged and the navigation appeared across the bottom. I don’t know if it’s an issue with MAP or this instance of it.

The image zoom was inadequate to make out details on the quilts. I’m not quilter, but I know you have to be able to see the stitching to really understand how the piece was constructed.  You can’t even get close enough to resolve emroidered words on the quilts, let only fine detail.

Content was scarce. I wanted more, at least something on every quilt, even if it was only bare bones provenance.

The quality of the audios is atrocious. I listened (or tried to) with both headphones and the iPad speaker. The audios sound like they were phoned in from someplace with very bad phone service, or they were overcompressed to conserve bandwidth. Either way, they’re hard to listen to.

On the whole
This app made me feel like I’d missed something special, which I think is definitely a kind of success.  I can’t say how it functioned in the space, though.

Takeaways
Using premade templates isn’t as limiting as you might think. And if you want it done fast, not reinventing the wheel makes sense.

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MoMA’s Abstract Expressionism NY

I have no special information on budgets for any of these apps, but MoMA’s Ab Ex NY has very high production values. Slick doesn’t come close to expressing how I felt using this app. From the graphical representation of the objects on the landing page, to the navigation, to the photography, all the pieces of the app feel like they were custom-built and tuned for the platform.  It’s an interesting counterpoint to the UVaM app, since most of the works here are essentially 2D, paintings and drawings, and the 3D objects in the show are treated as if they were 2D. There’s also the (in)famous cat video for the app.

Likes
Content depth is remarkable, and broad. Across all the objects I tried, there was something more to do, so even when I didn’t follow a link, I knew I was choosing to not go deeper, rather than hitting the wall beyond which no further content exists. This is a common occurrence for me using educational apps, so it’s a noteworthy departure.

The photo quality is superb throughout, and this app is really the only one of the four that let me get as zoomed in as I wanted to be without the image quality falling apart.

Glossaries and descriptions of techniques are becoming more common interpretive elements, praise be!  Telling me what a pallette knife is compared to showing me an artist demonstrating one is a little addition that I think has huge impact. More showing, and telling please!

Dislikes
I tried to find something, for fairness’ sake, but came up short. I really like this app.

On the whole
I like the way the app embodies the whole milieu of the New York Abstract Expressionists, showing not only their works, but their words, their images, their hangouts. It does all the things I’d want a companion app to do, and more. The art historical information and additional content are rich enough that I’ll probably keep this app on my tablet longer than UVaM or Infinite Variety.

Takeaways
Having a clear vision and hiring good people hardly ever results in a poor product.  Boatloads of money often help, too, though I wouldn’t be surprised if this app cost less than many might think.

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4) Pyrolia SA’s Road, Inc.

The non-museum entry here, Road Inc. was produced by a French multimedia publishing studio, Pyrolia SA, which lauds their first product as redefining publishing, and marrying the craftsmanship of traditional publishing with the latest technologies.  This sounds like so much PR bombast, but in Pyrolia’s case, it’s not far off the mark.  The amount of effort that went into creating a virtual museum of famous cars is undeniable. 50 3D models of legendary cars have been created at motion picture quality levels of detail.  Around this virtual collection, Pyrolia have collected a wealth of multimedia content, from essays, to contemporary film and video, advertising, and (a personal favorite of mine) the sounds of the engine revving for many of the cars.

Likes
The app is set up in such a way that all but one of the cars are literally under wraps, hidden under a sheet.  When you want to explore a car, you have to choose to download it and then wait while your tablet installs the new content.  At first, I was balked at how long it took, but once I realized how much content came with each car, I realized how clever this strategy is. This sucker is a really heavyweight. If everything was preinstalled, the app would be a gargantuan download that would scare a lot of people off.

Dislikes
I think I’m not the demographic this app was designed for. In fact, I know I’m not.  Luxury cars really aren’t my thing, and sometimes the tone of the essays can be a bit smug. C’est la vie.

The 3D models of the cars look fantastic, but you can’t zoom into them or shift your view, so if you want to look inside you’re out of luck, unless there are historical photos that show the details you’re interested in. In most cases this was true for me, but not all.

On the whole
Road, Inc. is an impressive piece of work. As an exhibition of fifty automobiles, it’s remarkably deep, easy to navigate, and a lot of fun even if cars aren’t your thing.

Takeaways
Another interesting convergence. When a publisher makes what is essentially a tablet version of a coffee table book, it winds up looking a lot like a tablet version of a museum exhibition. The whole digital publishing shift I wrote about in December is neatly embodied in this app.

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Discussing four very different apps can present the old “comparing oranges to apples” dilemma of trying to compare things that shouldn’t be. But I think that the four all try to get at a basic feature of museum-going; looking at something worthy and learning more about it (and, I like to think, your relationship to the object) through interpretation. In the next post, I’d like to pick apart some of the questions that came to my mind as I was exploring these apps and pondering how well they let users appreciate these objects in ways that they might do in person.

What questions come to your mind about these kinds of apps?