Anyone who has visited the National Museum of Australia in Canberra over the past six months may have come across a rather impressive exhibit telling the story of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, an important cultural part of Australian history. Why so impressive? It’s a 10-screen interactive multitouch exhibit.
Created by the team at Lightwell in conjunction with West Australian not-for-profit, cultural project organisation FORM, the display combines ten 46-inch multitouch screens to create a single interactive surface, in which different parts of the exhibit can be shown off.
Michael Hill from Lightwell was part of the team developing the exhibit, and told us exactly how they came to create a 10-screen museum exhibition:
“We had previously developed interactive installation projects with cameras and projectors, but for this project the client wanted the program to be able to travel to different locations. The MultiTouch Cells were a good solution to the issue of packing up and moving on without the complex set-up that cameras and projectors require. There is also a lot of detail in the content – from 100 year old maps to text and still images – so we needed something that had higher resolution than a projected image.
The project took nine months from start to finish. The biggest challenge was trying to address the sense of fatigue we felt visitors might experience in an interface that was 8 metres long. We tried a few different interface designs before settling on the points on a map approach which seems obvious now.”
The entire exhibit is powered by five Core i7 PCs running Ubuntu, with a single PC per pair of Multitouch screens. More impressive is the fact that the whole thing can handle at least 25 people using it at once.
Justin Thomas
Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 8:47 PMI saw something simular but smaller at Sydney Museum. I thought it was terrible because people focused on the play value (like the people doodling in that video) and there was limited actual content. I prefer physical exhibits at museums or at least exhibits with a high audio/video informational content.
Audrey Simmons
Friday, September 16, 2011 at 9:14 PMI think the video was an attempt to demonstrate how fascinating this type of exhibit can be. In normal use I believe it could meet all the needs of a museum visitor no matter what age or occupation. I would appreciate it best if there were ways to provide some sort of direction during the unfolding of the exhibit in order to get the story told from beginning to end.