Museums and the Web
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Objects as Interface, Gesture as Command: Incorporating NUI in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum
Abstract
This paper will examine the use of Natural User Interfaces in museums. Natural User Interfaces, or NUIs, are computer interfaces that utilize technologies to allow users to naturally interface with computers. Examples of prevalent NUIs include multi-touch technologies, made iconic by Apple's iPhone, and gestural technologies, like those used in the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect. This paper will use the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York as a case study. Recently, the Tenement Museum began a collaboration with Potion Media to create an original NUI for their upcoming exhibit which will interpret the stories of the many businesses that operated in the storefronts of the Museum's historic tenement building. This paper will explore the adoption of NUI in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and show how incorporating such technologies furthers a distributed learning environment that encourages learning both in the physical museum and in the online and digital spaces of the Museum.
Type:
Demonstration - show your project
Authors
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My name is Kathryn Barnard and I work in IT at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York. I also am currently pursuing a Masters degree in Museum Studies at NYU. My interests lie in incorporating NUI in distributed learning environments in museums and cultural institutions. |