Out with the Dialog Table, in with the Touch Wall

If you’ve explored our galleries, you’ve probably noticed the Dialog Table tucked into the Best Buy Info Lounge just off one of our main arteries. It’s a poster child of technical gotchas: custom hardware and software, cameras, projectors, finicky lighting requirements… Despite all the potential trouble embedded in the installation, it’s actually been remarkably solid apart from a few high-profile failures. At last tally, only the CPUS, capture cards, and one graphics board are original; the rest has been slowly replaced over the years as pieces have broken. (The graphics and video capture cards have drivers that aren’t upgradable at this point, so I’ve been trolling eBay to acquire various bits of antique hardware.)

It’s been a tank. A gorgeous, ahead-of-its-time, and mostly misunderstood tank. I’m both sad and excited to see it go.

I am, however, unequivocally excited about the replacement: two 65″ touch walls from Ideum. This change alone will alleviate one of the biggest human interface mis-matches with the old table: it wasn’t a touch surface, and everyone tried to use it that way.

We’re moving very quickly with our first round of work on the walls, trying to get something up as soon as possible and iterating from there. The immediate intention is to pursue a large-scale “big swipe” viewer of highlights from our collection. Trying to convey the multidisciplinary aspect of the Walker’s collection is always a challenge, but the Presenter wall gives us a great canvas with the option for video and audio.

With the recently announced alpha release of Gestureworks Core with Python bindings, I’m also excited for the possibilities of what’s next for the walls. The open source Python library at kivy.org looks like a fantastic fit for rapidly developing multi-touch apps, with the possible benefit of pushing out Android / iOS versions as well. At the recent National Digital Forum conference in New Zealand I was inspired by a demo from Tim Wray showing some of his innovative work in presenting collections on a tablet. We don’t have a comprehensive body of tags around our work at this point, but this demo seems to provide a compelling case for gathering that data. Imagine being able to create a set of objects on the fly showing “Violent scenes in nature” just from the paired tags “nature” and “violent”. Or “Blue paintings from Europe” using the tag “blue” and basic object metadata. Somehow the plain text description imposed on simple tag data makes the set of objects more interesting (to me, anyway). I’m starting to think that collection search is moving into the “solved” category, but truly browsing a collection online… We’re not there.

Touch screens, and multitouch in particular, seem destined for eventually greatness in the galleries, but as always the trick is to make the technical aspect of the experience disappear. I hope by starting very simply with obvious interactions we can avoid the temptation to make this about the screens, and instead about the works we’ll be showing.