Museum Time Machine
Tango Augmented Reality Tablet. This solution 'gamified' collecting floorplans and pages from Hall Guides from specific dates, using these guidebook pages – rather than historic photographic images -- to explore the Museum. The Use of a vertical slider to compare old and new images was fun and highlighted the interest in seeing and exploring with the old floorplan graphics.
Octopuses' Garden. Using Bluetooth beacons, this solution proposed a mobile app that would allow users to see historic hall images (that would be coupled with historic exhibit information) while they explored today's Museum, using a vertical slider to move between old and new images. The use of new images of specimens or spaces that mimic old images of specimens or spaces is a good one. * This challenge's main image (found online?) depicted the main hall of the Natural History Museum in London (d'oh!). Ouch.
Polygon Time Machine. This solution traced floor plan spaces on the floorplan to provide location-based interaction with the map, employing Lat and Long data. Users employ a 'temporal slider' to see the spaces emerge over time, but this was not linked to an images. Potentially, with a link to images and additional work on the map tracing, this could develop into a useful tool.
This challenge might have better described the desired outcomes/outputs of the project more explicitly so it stated that the historic images must be presented, along with (and in the same view as) information about date and space, preferably with a floor plan. While provided, the instructions for this challenge didn’t explicitly require use of the AMNH Permanent Halls Master List with Variant Names – and it should have.
- Tango Time Machine and its presentation
- Octopus Garden Time Machine and its demo and presentation
- Polygon Map and its presentation
- The Room Where It Happens {not finished, not presented}
Wouldn't it be cool if we could virtually "recreate" the museum at various points in history? Museum Time Machine would create a user experience that virtually shows people what the museum has looked like and what was exhibited in the past, using images, floor plans, and information from museum publications. The goal is to create a user experience that shows people what the museum looked like and what was exhibited in the past.
What if visitors to the Library web site could virtually explore images of Museum galleries at different times over the Museum’s history? While our ‘permanent’ exhibits have changed over time, one thing has remained relatively constant: the buildings and galleries on each level. Thousands of Museum images in the Library’s Digital Special Collections site include a tag “Permanent Hall” and the authoritative name of that exhibit. A spreadsheet named “AMNH Permanent Halls Master List with Variant Names” includes all the authoritative Permanent Hall names for all the Museum’s exhibits and the building number/section and floor level. A site plan for the Museum complex “AMNH_siteplan_with_sections_hack_bw.tif” includes all the building/section numbers.
A collection of historic floor plans (in folder “FloorPlans”) will offer additional inspiration along with the more recent interactive floor plans in the Resources list below.
*This plan shows the building or section numbers.
Together these resources will provide for the creation of inventive explorations of the Museum’s images by Library researchers and the general public. More images could be added over time to develop a thorough temporal view of the entire Museum. As other resources are digitized and made available, such as the art used to create exhibits or archival documentation of the exhibits’ creation, these too could be added to this interactive exploratory framework allowing for a time machine-like view of the institution’s history.
An overarching goal is to use images that document how the museum's halls change over time. This includes halls whose content (i.e. exhibit) has changed, or where there is some indication that the image was taken at another time (as indicated by visitor garb or by different arrangement of exhibits). We also want to include all images of halls that no longer exist (for example, Eskimo Hall, Earth History Hall, Oil Geology Hall, etc.) and permanent halls with titles similar to current ones that have since changed location. If permanent halls look identical to today's hall, they should not be included.
You may want to review and collaborate with AMNH API Portal hackathon teams to discuss working with API wrappers around DSpace, Omeka, and BHL as documented on the Online Resources And Data Sets page.
Some possible solutions:
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A mobile app that show people in the museum "What Was There". A museum visitor could move throughout the halls and select images throughout time appropriate to their current location. Possibly also an augmented reality function?
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A "Google Maps" style "street view" which has a time dimensional aspect. An experience that lets a user navigate around museum floor plans in space as well as in time! Potentially in virtual reality...?
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Whatever else you can think of!
- Entity records for Permanent Halls
- Collected images of floor plans
- Annual Reports
- Natural History Magazine (DSpace)
- American Museum Journal (DSpace)
- AMNH Permanent Halls Master List with Variant Names
- Museum General Hall Guides (BHL)
- Digital Special Collections (Omeka): Use the "Permanent Hall" field to determine which halls are permanent.
- Previous floor plans (Internet Archive Wayback Machine)
- Interactive floor plan of current space
- OLD Interactive floor plan of current space
- AMNH website
- any other publicly available and license free resources you can find (digitized newspapers with images?)
