Museum with high-tech attitude invites involvement

Net Results: At first glance, the room looks like, well, a room. Two Persian rugs cover the floor, two bookshelves are packed with old books. An antique desk has an old map rolled open across its top. Chairs, an old-fashioned lamp, shelves with Venetian glass vases and a battered trunk

But behind these worn objects lies a variety of cutting-edge technology, hidden from the casual viewer but enabling them to interact with many of the room's objects in unexpected ways.

The room is in Limerick's Hunt Museum, and the project is an experiment in "ubiquitous computing", where technology is integrated so thoroughly with the everyday world and environment that we do not notice it.

For the project, four universities - the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, the University of Nottingham, King's College, London, and the University of Limerick and its Interaction Design Centre (IDC) - have joined forces through a European initiative called SHAPE (Situating Hybrid Assemblies in Public Environments). SHAPE has the goal of bringing ubiquitous computing into public environments, such as museums.

Previous projects include interactive exhibits at the Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm and at Nottingham Castle - the former was so popular that it has been retained permanently.

At the Hunt, visitors to the exhibit learn about four unusual objects from the Hunt collection by taking the role of collector. It's a clever approach, designed to let viewers see, explore and hypothesise about the objects very much as John and Gertrude Hunt, the antique dealers who gathered the museum's marvellously eclectic and curious items, would have themselves.

The project participants spent two-and-a-half years "just getting to know about the museum and the collection, and to understand how the Docents here convey the themes of the museum to visitors", says Ms Luigina Ciolfi, co-ordinator of the project at University of Limerick.

"We wanted people to think about the objects out of the cases, and the stories that come with each object. In particular, we thought we'd do something around very mysterious objects, where there is no specific story around the object, and no one really knows what it was used for."

This means every visitor, from grannies to small children, gets to be an expert.

"Because these objects don't have explanations, visitors don't encounter experts telling them what they are. They can be the experts themselves," adds IDC researcher Ms Marilyn Lennon.

The objects include a strange, bumpy carved stone, an incised and enamelled disk, an angular, golf-ball sized Roman-era object and a Y-shaped iron object.

Visitors arrive into the room, designed to capture the sense of a collector's study, and gather a set of four plastic cards with an image of each object. The cards can be taken to various locations in the room - placed in the chest, on the desk, on the table - and suddenly, a nearby screen will come to life, yielding snippets of known information about each object.

Put them in the trunk, and what looks like a mirror turns into a screen, revealing details about each item. Put them on the table, and a three-dimensional image of the object appears on a plasma screen, where it can be rotated about. If the screen is tapped with a small rubber hammer, the object will make the noise it would make if pinged in the real world.

Put the cards on the map, and a screen tells you whether the object or similar ones have been found in that region of the world.

Next stop is an old radio. Tune the dial to the image of each object and you'll hear a stream of guesses about what each was for, recorded by previous visitors.

Behind all this fun are computers, a "sonic browser" that lets people explore information through the use of sound, a variety of sensors, tracking technologies, and embedded RFID (radio frequency identification) tags in the plastic cards, which trigger the flow of information.

Visitors can explore the room as long as they want. Then, they enter a second room where, on four plinths, sit life-size replicas of each object.

Here, says Ms Ciolfi, visitors get to handle each object, feel its weight, and muse some more. Finally, they step over to a phone, insert one of their cards, and are prompted to leave their guess about what the object might be, which is beamed over to the radio, where it joins the others.

"Most museums say, don't touch, don't get involved. We're saying, 'Do touch, do get involved'," says Ms Lennon.

"We're smearing computing and sensing capabilities back into the real world," says Prof Liam Bannon, head of IDC. He wants technology to disappear into the background while enhancing everyday experience. He believes technology should become as invisible as electricity.

The exhibit only lasts until June 19th. Do get in to see it if you can - it is full of pleasures for the technologically minded, tech-neutral and technophobic alike. As Prof Bannon notes, this is a project that is not about technology yet is about technology at the same time.

Karlin's tech weblog: http:\\radio.weblogs.com\0103966