iPhone Apps for Museums?
Posted in Technology on 02. Mar, 2009
Musematic stumbles upon an iPhone app to help a museum. A spirit level, I think, from the iHandy Carpenter app or the free iHandy Level (under utilities on the Apple App Store).
There’s got to be some other things useful for museums. Can’t find any app that would help with exhibition design. I imagine something that can act as a wifi hard drive so people could copy information about an exhibition to their iPhones would be useful. Or even an app with an entire museum’s database on it. An app that has all tour maps for on it would be useful.
Any other ideas?
There was a convo on twitter a while ago discussing the usefulness of an app that would alert you to an object in your proximity that maybe of interest to you. I would want something (similar to a tour map) that would allow me to route a visit depending on which exhibits/objects I want to see. Both would probably be quite complicated to create.
Erm… An RFID with GPS data on every object, an XML overlay of a map image, a museum wide RFID scanner, an iPhone app that links to the scanner via museum-wide wifi.
Doesn’t seem that hard
If a museum or gallery is using a CMS with an RSS feed to display collections information, there are tools that make rendering pages on the iPhone relatively straightforward. Intersquash works for any site with an RSS feed, and WPtouch works for sites using WordPress. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Omeka community is working on something that works natively with that platform, as well. While these aren’t, strictly speaking, “iPhone apps,” they help to turn an existing site into a nice-looking iPhone app in relatively short order.
Well, I know there is an app for reading comics, (comiczeal for example) but your wondering what comics have to do with exhibitions. Actually alot I think. At least the way that you experience a condensed version of them on something like an iphone. whether the images and words are coming together on a page or a wall- on an iphone they both become words and images on a screen. Imagine if you planned out sequentially, like a comic, how a viewer would walk through a space, what the labels would say and then had them on your iphone. You could keep walking through your show without being there until you get it right. Of course, order isn’t everything- but sequence and narrative is.
fyi — there’s a workshop at Museums and the Web 2009 about this: Programming the iPhone/iPod touch for your museum
Bert Degenhart Drenth, Adlib Information Systemshttp://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/abstracts/prg_335001968.html
A different take on iPhone apps for museums – a custom iPhone app could be used by a museum for fundraising, visitor information, special content feeds, and membership awareness. The Toy Lounge of St. Paul Minnesota creates custom iPhone apps for museums and other nonprofits – http://TheToyLounge.com – try something new for membership and fundraising!
Pete,
Check out http://www.juncanoo.com. I’m a student at the university of Pennsylvania developing apps for museums and I’d love to talk with you about it all – I’m sure you have some great ideas and ton of knowledge on the space. Please email me if at all possible and we’ll talk in some detail.
Ayo