//www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9FMlv5a_FI

That was shot by Nate Bolt with a DJI Phantom quad-copter and both a GoPro Hero3 Black and an iPhone 5S. Slowed down with Twixtor in After Effects to make up for the glaring lack of a Gimbal.

A stunning video taken over Niagara Falls this past summer with the same helicopter (watch this one full-screen):

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfoLYTKObiU

Not as lovely, here’s an example of flying the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Gateway Arch and the Museum Court house in St. Louis with a turbo Ace X830 helicopter. This has potential, but the blades hurt the effect.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP62Bk-ydRo

Inside the Australian Museum is a charming, short view of the collection from Journeys to the Deep. However, the shots are shaky. The stabilization methods used in the above library example are important.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnR0tGpGJmw

Drone regulations vary by locality, but is generally legal within height and distance limits from the operator.

Not only are the results a fresh view of scenes, lending an appealing aerial perspective, but audiences are now used to complex camera shots on television and film, so  step up your game with your visuals.

Launched in autumn 2011 by a British nonprofit, HistoryPin pins historical items on a map. Their service demonstrates the potential for a global, crowdsourced database of historical media.

HistoryPin now boasts 277,348 items. Their aim is to encourage a broad audience to take part in local and global history, help people feel closer to the places they live, to conserve and open up global archives, and to become a large global archive of human history. So far, they’re off to a good start. Many cities have several dozen pins, and a few large cities have hundreds.

The challenge of global coverage

In the United Kingdom, HistoryPin’s home country, they have ~50k pins now. Some of those pins are cross-referenced with Google’s street view. For example, here are Elvis impersonators in Westminster, London, in 2006, superimposed on a current street view scene:

Despite the apparently high numbers, HistoryPin’s growth appears to be flatlining. They drew ~20k users in the few few months of 2011, helped by glowing press coverage at launch, but only at 30k more users in the last two years. They have 1,353 institutions registered, but few institutions are doing large-scale uploads. It’s unclear why growth is poor. The site is easy to use, and the usage terms are reasonable. They have a web site, as well as Android and iOS apps. One possible problem is that it’s unclear what the long-term future of HistoryPin is, so it’s not necessarily worth investing a lot of time. Also, they have a closed system, with no way to export content back out.

Growth needs to be exponential if HistoryPin has any hope of carpeting the globe. Relative to the U.K.’s 94k square miles of landmass, HistoryPin has barely 1 item for every two square miles. In London’s 607 square miles, HistoryPin has ~390 pins, again, barely 1 pin for every two square miles. HistoryPin would need at least 100x more pins to have serious global coverage. (For a sense of the scale needed for a global view, as of last year, Google Street View had photographed over 5 million miles of unique streets, covering 39 countries and about 3,000 cities, and they are rapidly expanding that.)

Nevertheless, the concept is compelling. Here’s an image from HistoryPin of a train station in Tuscon, Arizona, USA:

And here’s an image of the same building, 9 decades later, from Google Street View. It is now a restaurant:

Going global — from space

A global view is available from satellites. Here is a comparison of Tucson in summery 1984 (left) vs 2011 (right) from NASA’s State of Flux gallery, which posts weekly comparison images from satellites and land-based cameras.

Tucson, in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, is one of the oldest continually inhabited areas of North America, with evidence of settlements 3,000 years ago. As with many western cities, Tucson was organized on a grid pattern, which can be seen from space. The side-by-side photos show that the city has grown quickly over the past 30 years. Indeed, population in the greater Tucson area has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than one million in 2011. Expansion has been largely in the eastern region since mountains on the north, west and south restrict development.

The State of Flux site is run by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and California Institute of Technology. It is a convenient launching pad for educators and the general public interested in change. The time periods range from  centuries to days. Some are related to climate change, urbanization, or the ravage of natural hazards such as fires and floods.

Trekker is a wearable backpack outfitted with a camera system on top. It’s portability enables Google to gather images while maneuvering through tight, narrow spaces or locations only accessible by foot. The Trekker is operated by an Android device and consists of 15 lenses angled in a different direction so the images can be stitched together into 360-degree panoramic views. As the operator walks, photos are taken roughly every 2.5 seconds. See a view of the Bright Angel Trail. Read more at Google’s blog announcement.

Trolley goes into museums. Google developed a push-cart system that could easily fit through museum doorways and navigate around sculptures. Here are views of several museums Google has covered.

Snowmobile was another hack, put together over the course of a few weekends (they say) using some 2x4s, duct tape, and extra hard drives wrapped in ski jackets to last through the freezing conditions. Motivated by the 2010 Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada — the snowmobile mapped slopes and trails which fans would be seeing during the games.

Trike is a three-wheel bicycle developed in 2009 for recording from parks and trails, university campuses, theme parks, zoos, monuments, sports stadiums, and the like. For these locations, which are often private land, Google signs a deal with the location. They have a submission form for new locations, which is highly overbooked.

Cars were Google’s first step into street views, launching in 2007 with 5 U.S. cities, and now delivering 360° panoramic views from locations worldwide. Starting with an SUV, then a van, Google settled on a fleet of cars. The latest car has 15 lenses taking 360 degrees of photos. It also has motion sensors to track its position, a hard drive to store data, a small computer running the system, and lasers to capture 3D data to determine distances within the Street View imagery.

A related project takes underwater panoramas, such as a view of Lady Elliot Island, QLD, Australia.

Check out Google’s gallery of some of their best street view collections. Hopefully they will continue to connect more of our world.

Here’s a list of ten apps that computer nerds turn to when they want to engage their young kids in math and science…

Dragonbox – “My 3.5 year olds were doing algebra with fractions without realizing it” said a user. “I’ve personally seen a 4 year old get an elementary understanding of algebra from this app,” said another user, Thwyx. And “fascinatingly friendly and effective way to teach symbolic arithmetic to children,” said stonecypher. “Awesome and I highly recommend it, even to adults. It’s basically a series of algebraic puzzles, using cards that start off not as numbers,” said Roogna. This app was favored by several parents.

Isaac Newton’s Gravity — “You try to solve mazes by putting blocks in the righ place to let the ball roll down. My nephew has played that game since he was 3,” said codegen. Though user fermion notes that most kids need to be a little older.

Cut the Rope — “physics engine in it is a nice introduction to the likes of gravity, elasticity, etc.” said Kergan.

Monkey Preschool Lunchbox — loved by the 4.5 year old of Thorrablot. “Definitely geared more for pre school aged like 2-4,” said iTunes reviewer jteyer.

Feed Me Oil – “The first levels are easy enough for a young child, and our little girl loves it. With the fans, boards, and other mechanisms its a good introduction to gravity and other forces,” said myxiplx.

Algebra Touch – “Amazing app that demonstrates how variables work in algebraic equations, highly recommended. Maybe too high level for a 3 year old but it’s about as mathy as iOS can get,” said mewsenews. This is not a game; it’s a simple drag-and-drop equation solver.

Monster Physics – “Both my 4 and 7 year olds love Monster Physics. And by the same author, Stack the States and Stack the Countries are excellent for geography,” said MojoRilla. A game creating and controlling inventions.

Intro to Math – “she got a huge amount of use from, which while just basic as the names would imply was good around that age,” said Roogna.

Nova Elements – “When she got curious about elements, we picked up the Nova Elements app, which answered her questions at the time pretty well,” said Roogna. This was a complimentary app to a NOVA broadcast.

SkyView — “I have a very smart and curious 3-year-old daughter… She has a wonderfully curious mind, and really likes SkyView already,” said Timothy.

And a bonus recommendation for older kids:

Numbers League – targeting older kids, “covers math down to simple addition and subtraction and up to multiplication, division and simple fractions,” says rreay. The app is based on a card game. “M three children love to play against each other and their Mom and Dad to see who can make the highest point captures,” says iTunes reviewer Sarah Chase.

Other slashdot users also recommended: Tesla Toy and Angry Birds Space to develop an intuitive sense of orbits and attraction/repulsions.

You are not limited to Microsoft Excel, or your own programming abilities. We’re now in an awesome generation for visualization, with dozens of freely available software libraries — which developers have spent months (or years!) building. Increasingly these use Javascript (so they work in all browsers and mobile devices). The folks at Datavisualization.ch highlight most of the best tools for making maps and charts, or processing data…

Arbor.js is a library of force-directed layout algorithms plus abstractions for graph organization and refresh handling.

CartoDB is a web service for mapping, analyzing and building applications with data.

Circos is a software package for visualizing data in a circular layout.

Cubism.js is a library for creating interactive time series and horizon graphs based on D3.js

Dance.js is a simple data-driven visualization framework based on Data.js and Underscore.js

DataWrangler is an interactive web application for data cleaning and transformation.

Degrafa is a powerful declarative graphics framework for rich user interfaces, data visualizations and mapping.

Envision.js is a library for creating fast, dynamic and interactive time series visualizations.

Flare is a set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations in Flash (ActionScript). Note, Flash is increasing an obsolete choice of platform because it is rarely supported on mobile devices.

GeoCommons is a public community and set of tools to access, visualize and analyze data with compelling map visualizations.

Gephi is a visualization and exploration platform for networks with dynamic and hierarchical graphs.

Google Chart Tools is a collection of simple to use, customizable and free to use interactive charts and data tools.

Google Fusion Tables is a web application that makes it easy to host, manage, collaborate on, visualize, and publish data tables.

Google Refine is a tool for working with data, cleaning it up, reformating it or extending it with web services.

Impure / Quadrigram is a  visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information.

JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit is a Javascript library that provides tools for creating interactive data visualizations for the web.

Kartograph is a simple and lightweight framework for creating beautiful, interactive vector maps.

Leaflet is a lightweight JavaScript library for making tile-based interactive maps for desktop and mobile browsers.

Many Eyes is a web application to build, share and discuss graphic representation of user uploaded data.

MapBox is a web platform for hosting custom designed map tiles and a set of open source tools to produce them.

Miso Dataset is a client-side data transformation and management library to loade, parse, sorte, query & manipulate data.

Modest Maps is a display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Flash, JavaScript and Python.

Mr. Data Converter is a web application that converts Excel data into one of several web-friendly formats, including HTML, JSON and XML.

NodeBox is a desktop application that lets you create generative, static, animated or interactive visuals.

Paper.js is a vector graphics scripting framework in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.

Peity is a simple jQuery plugin that converts an element’s content into a simple mini pie, line or bar chart.

Polymaps is a library for making dynamic, interactive maps with image- and vector-based tiles.

Prefuse is a set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations in Java. Note that Java is increasingly marginalized, and is not a good choice for most mobile development.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment to create images, animations, and interactions. Processing.js is the sister project of Processing that makes projects work using web standards and without any plug-ins.

Protovis is a library that composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots.

R is a software environment for statistical computing and graphical techniques. It’s a complex language, but highly favored by people who have to process a lot of numerical-type data.

Raphaël is a small library that simplifies working with vector graphics on the web.

Recline.js is a simple but powerful library for building data applications in pure JavaScript and HTML.

Rickshaw is a library for creating interactive time series graphs based on D3.js.

Sigma.js is an open-source lightweight library to display interactively static and dynamic graphs.

Tableau Public is a desktop application to build and post interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables to the web.

Tangle is a library that allow to interactively explore, play, and see the document update immediately.

Timeline is a tool to create timelines with data and media from different sources like Google Docs, Twitter, Flickr or Vimeo.

For more information on any of the above, and a fresh list of anything new, see the selected tools compiled by DataVisualization.ch.

Also, IDEA’s SpicyNodes project is a way to easily display concept-map type visualizations. Currently available in web browsers using Flash, and coming to the iPad in 2013.

To get thinking about it, here are some simple game structures that work well for museum learning:

• Roleplaying Games: Create powerful empathetic experiences, and give insight into what happens when different points of view collide. Roleplaying games can range from simple to fearsomely complex when variables of character qualities, goals, obstacles, and novel situations are factored in.
• Action Games: Get visitors moving. In outdoor spaces or large indoor halls, visitors can running through boundary areas, collect items, and navigate obstacles. Instructors create a physical space with very simple materials, like poker chips, lengths of rope, and paper plates, and use students’ powers of imagination to redefine them as resources like food or water, and constraints like space or predatation.
• Tabletop Games:  Board games, card games, dice games, tile games, and even paper-and-pencil games can create a context for history learning. Building on existing game types, content and imagery can be adapted to local content and topics.
• Parlor Games/Social Games: Some games require only people. Both period games like Victorian parlor games, and games that use words, motions, questions and answers (like 20 Questions). Street play games, like handclapping games, hopscotch, foursquare, or running bases, are also social and simple to present.
• Period Games: Bring a historical moment to life, giving a view of material culture and leisure time activities. At Strawbery Banke, red baskets contain popular toys and games from a historical time — a set of marbles in the 1950s Shapley-Drisco House, a Shut the Box board in the Colonial tavern.

See Moon’s article at the AASLH Arrrrducation Blog >

See also “Gaming the Past,” a repository for theory, research, and implementations of simulation games for history education.

Touropia has put together a collection of photographs and history which will educate all, and may even prompt a trip for some.

A quick virtual tour.

Go to article at Touropia >

See the site: Google Art Project

Google’s project also includes their “street view” to provide walkthroughs of 46 museums, with more on the way. Google’s team took 360 degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of over hundreds of rooms within the museums. The gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps. Here’s walking around the Acropolis Museum:

Young Knight in a Landscape

Zoom. Zoom. 

All the images can be zoomed, some to a stunning degree. For 46 objects, visitors can see extraordinary detail using super high resolution or ‘gigapixel’ photo capturing technology, enabling the viewer to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond that possible with the naked eye.

At right is ‘Young Knight in a Landscape‘, (1510) by Vittore Carpaccio from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. This is what you can see on the museum’s current web site:

But check out the level of detail which the museum gives you via Google’s Art Project:

More range. More access. 

Amit Sood leads Google's effort to bring the world's greatest museums online. This started as his "20%" project.

Their online collection spans a wide range of institutions, large and small, traditional art museums as well as less traditional settings for great art. “The Art Project is going global, thanks to our new partners from around the entire world. It’s no longer just about the Indian student wanting to visit Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi,” said Amit Sood, Head of Art Project, Google.

Google suggests you check out the White House in Washington D.C., the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, or the Santiniketan Triptych in the halls of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi.

Videos, hangouts, online learning.

The expanded site has more powerful browsing (e.g., by period, artist or type of artwork), and integrates Google’s “hangouts.” Their videos (e.g., stories from curators) are collected in a central ‘Art Project’ YouTube channel.

In a smart move, Google also worked with Khan Academy’s smARThistory, who made 90 Khan Academy videos expressly for Google Art Project version 2. See them here.

Other uses of the technology

Google is using the same technology to host content on a few other institutions’ sites. Under the auspices of the Cultural Institute, Google is producing high resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, digitizing the archives of famous figures such as Nelson Mandela, and creating 3D models of 18th century French cities.

What does this mean?

Access is growing. Museums are rethinking control vs. outreach. Is it better to limit access to real-life visitors who buy tickets and shop the museum store, or make culture freely available? It is better to lock down access to promote image licensing as a revenue stream, or release publicly hoping that free access will open doors for newer business models?

Structuring a course

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) currently has six 8 or 10 week online courses. The cost is $200 for self-guided courses, or $350 for instructor-led. The latter enroll 30-45 students. MoMA offers both knowledge classes, e.g., “Modern and Contemporary Art: 1945–1989,” and knowledge/skill courses, e.g., “Materials and Techniques of Postwar Abstract Painting,” in which students do hands-on work at home.

The instructor-led classes offer structure, socialization and personalization; whereas, the self-guided courses are about individual freedom, providing access to curated articles and video, with no live instructor facilitation nor social interaction with other students.

The studio-art offerings have weekly assignments. For example, students paint canvases using the  materials and techniques of iconic artists. They photograph their works in progress and finished, and upload them to discuss with other students and the instructor. Wendy Woon directs MoMA’s education department. She feels the 10-week timeframe has worked well for studio art, allowing enough time for a sense of trust and community to develop in the discussion forums so that students are willing to have “critical conversations” criticizing each other’s work.

At the completion of the course, MoMA students receive a certificate by email.

Each week’s lesson includes a Art History video lecture on a specific artist, 3-6 videos from the gallery with a ‘visual unwinding’ of the artists’ techniques, articles, slideshows, suggested readings, links to artwork on the MoMA site, and a detailed studio video demonstrating the techniques of an artist. The studio course totals about 20 hours of video footage. The art history survey course has 25% less video since there’s no studio component.

Texas artist Carol Wickenhiser-Schaudt says: “Unlike being in the museum, [we were] able to view the pieces up close, and things were pointed out to us that we may never see if we were there in person.”

The New York Times Knowledge Network offers a variety of online courses, generally taught by Times staff. The network is a good example of a traditional publisher exploring new revenue models and ways to inform the public. The courses are diverse, ranging from the arts to business to science. Some courses offer credit via partner schools.

Many NYT courses focus on personal skills, typically various kinds of writing (e.g., writing medical memoirs), last 4-10 weeks, and cost $200-1,000.

The 4-week “Writing A Medical Memoir” course ($225) was created and taught last year by Times reporter Denise Grady. The outcome of the course is that students produce a personal memoir of their experience with illness or injury. A good friend of this blogger took the course and found it very meaningful.

The course began by reviewing four essays that illustrate superb writing, and then the instructor coached students in writing their own essays. There were daily self-paced lessons, online discussion forums and web links, and scheduled online chats. The chat sessions and course contents were archived for students to review any time in the future.

Online learning is flourishing in the knitting and crocheting community (see my post about the Ravelry online knitting community).

Craftsy/Sympoz is an internet startup based in Denver, Colorado, offering 35 courses on various crafty topics, from knitting socks to quilting. Tens of thousands of students have taken their online courses, priced from $15 to $60 for unlimited access. They also offer occasional free courses to spike interest.

Craftsy courses consist of a series of video lectures, written documents, open Q&A-style discussion, plus video bookmarking, note-taking and private messaging. There is no fixed schedule, students come and go freely.

User interfaces

The best user interfaces are specifically designed to delight learners, make content easily accessible, and facilitate easy discussion. The Craftsy courses are the best of the three. Here are some screenshots:

In Craftsy, there’s a clear progression of steps through the course, easy access to course materials and notes, and an active, threaded discussion. The videos are designed to be displayed on screen, as part of the course.

The MoMA course interface is more cluttered and dense, but they have a lot more content to cover, with many videos, text, and images for students to review in each course. The course’s web software runs on the Haiku learning system. Screenshots follow:

The NYT Knowledge Network user interface is hard to use, ugly, and inefficient. They use the Epsilen course management system, which is designed for school administrators, so it includes lots of irrelevant features like grade books and quizzes, while key functions are buried or broken: It takes multiple clicks to read single messages from fellow students, and uploading documents breaks their formatting so they are hard to read. Following are two screenshots, personal details obscured. As a work-around, Grady says she used email to directly communicate with her students.

Course development

The NYT medical memoir course had the simplest development process because there was not extensive curricula to prepare before the course launched. Grady took the better part of a day to plan four short intro videos, and a few hours for a casual shoot. Unlike the knitting videos, which need high quality closeups, the purpose of Grady’s videos was to set the scene, and they kept it “very quick and casual. Not a huge big deal. My hair looks awful.” Grady says she “taught it the way I would have taught a regular classroom course, except they could see me and I couldn’t see them.” Once the course started, however, the workload became very substantial, consuming all her free time and more.

Shooting a video of El Lissitzky at MoMA for an upcoming course.

The MoMA courses are much more complex to prepare. The most time consuming part of creating courses is planning, video production and editing, says Woon. Shooting videos in a large museum like MoMA requires a lot of coordination between departments. It takes around 10 months from concept to launch. The development team is two full-time digital learning staff plus an adult & academic programs staff member, and an intern. The team collaborates with the instructors to build the course and manage an outside crew who shoots and edits the videos.

They start by running an instructor-led course, and then spin off a self-guided course the following semester, with some improvements based on first semester evaluations. The self-guided courses are edited to be flexible, since self-guided students may take a nonlinear sequence through the material.

Students have a range of experience levels, from complete novices to working artists with long exhibition histories. Students are predominantly female, aged 30 and older, and 55% of them are from the U.S. Woon says student’s primary motivation is “their belief in MoMA’s authority in modern art” and “they expect a high-quality experience.” Secondary motivations are “flexibility and accessibility”. Wickenhiser-Schaudt, the online student, said the classes are for serious students who do not live close enough to the MoMA to take in-person courses.

The knitting courses have a shorter production cycle. Courses are planned by the instructors, who typically work in the craft field as authors and teachers. Instructor Linda Permann said it took her a few months to outline and develop her course. Once the course is developed, there is a ~3-day video shoot (using HD video) with the Craftsy team and a film crew. Professional video editors produce finished videos. Above is the studio of Carol Ann Waugh during a Craftsy filming.

Craftsy loads the content into their proprietary course management system, developed by their parent company, Sympoz, which handles the technical details of course registration, displaying video and written materials, and online community. Sympoz is expanding their formula to other topics, such as cooking and personal finance. Nearly 400,000 people have created accounts with their site. At this time, the Sympoz backend is not available to use for your own projects.

Human touch

These courses may be online, but the human experience is vital for all of them.

At MoMA, charisma carries the day. Students praised instructor Corey D’Augustine’s charm and the fact he brought real-life knowledge as a practicing artist, art historian and conservator. Here’s a promo video, to get a feel for his style:

Student interaction is a vital too. The online discussion forums were buzzing with approximately a dozen active student participants. D’Augustine said that, “week to week, I’m amazed at the discussions that have taken place between students in, say, Moscow and Miami, Caracas in Colombia, or Croton-on-Hudson in New York.” Dallas artist Deborah Rhee said in a blog post that it was “a full-time job keeping up” with discussions in a section of the web site known as ‘The Cedar Bar.’ UK artist and art teacher Mania Row says she is still in touch with her fellow students.

The availability of the instructor has a big impact: in one D’Augustine course, he had other obligations at the same time, and students complained he was aloof. In another course, students said he was attentive and responsive.

Rhee said the course was “actually more intensive than being in class for a few hours a day,” and said her “personal art practice has most definitely matured” from the first MoMA online course she took. Rhee feels “it is the best investment I have made for myself and my Arts practice since beginning my journey in Art a decade ago.” Similarly, Wisconsin artist Myrna Leigh said in a blog post that the painting class she took in Fall 2011 was “informative and fun,” and she introduced the new techniques she learned into her work. Enthusiastic students continue the discussion on an official MoMA alumni Facebook page.

Craftsy’s instructors are charming and idiosyncratic. They directly address the viewer, and convey sincere enthusiasm. They’ve honed their stage presence with years of in-person classes at local stores, craft conferences and retreats. The good instructors are diligent about logging in daily to answer student questions.

Meanwhile, each Craftsy course builds an archive of questions and answers, and general chit-chat. There’s enough usage volume, and students will often reply to other students. In crafts, everyone is an expert on their personal experiences, and knitters love to talk about their favorite yarns and colors, and commiserate over small mistakes. The chat in the paywalled communities of Craftsy differs from that on the free community at Ravelry in that the discussions tend to have a much more on-topic “course” type of feel.

An instructive experience

Here are some views of the teaching experience:

Denise Grady is an experienced science and health reporter at The New York Times. She says she “dreamed up the course and got excited about the idea of helping people tell stories about life-changing events. Forgive me if this sounds trite but it is kind of a labor of love. It’s very intense, and rewarding. Quite fascinating. People show up with remarkable stories. It sells out every time.” The course doesn’t bring in much revenue (approximately $6,500), and Grady still had her full-time newsroom responsibilities while teaching. “The time commitment was huge,” Grady says. “Tens of hours, is the best way I can put it. Hours of preparation for each online session even though they were only an hour apiece. Many many hours reading drafts, commenting on them and returning.” Due to the workload and drain, she declined to teach this spring, and another Times journalist, David Corcoran, is teaching the course instead. Grady hopes to teach again in Fall 2012.

Donna Druchunas teaches three knitting courses (all priced at $60), and has over 5000 students enrolled. Craftsy is a significant income source for Druchunas (the $300k+ revenue is shared between her and Craftsy) and also a way to indirectly promote her books. She has authored several knitting books, and teaches in-person classes at local yarn shops and at knitting conferences and retreats on topics such as rug knitting, making yarn, and knitting socks and sweaters. She acknowledges that online courses make it harder to detect confused or frustrated students, but that’s mitigated by the clearer instructions in an online setting where students “can see things close up and replay the videos over and over again as often as they want.” While she can’t directly observe students working, she can comment on photos students upload. Druchunas spends ~15 minutes a day answering new questions in the courses.

Linda Permann teaches two crochet courses (priced at $30 & $60). She is a full-time crochet designer, writer and teacher. She has a few books, an ongoing column in Crochet Today magazine, and writes for other outlets. She finds teaching personally rewarding, and also useful to “stay in touch with crocheters and what is ‘hard’ for them.” She says that many communities lack convenient local crochet classes, “so I really wanted to jump in and provide a couple of intensive classes that would help people grow their skills.” Permann logs in once or twice a day to answer student questions, and her daily workload is ~20 minutes.

Stefanie Japel teaches three courses (priced $30-60) and a free mini-course, with a total of 16,000 paid and unpaid students. Japel is an author and teacher, as well as a staffer with Sympoz. A few years ago, she was a new mom, with a toddler and an infant, and she was unable to keep up with traveling to events for teaching. She started teaching online using Ning, where she started with shorter (4-8 week) courses, and amateur quality video. At Craftsy, the video production is a high level, courses never expire, and there’s a support team (designers, tech support, help desk, customer support). Japel invests an hour a week to maintain her three classes and the free workshop, answering questions and talking with students.

Japel has found the online and in-person courses complement each other. For example, in recent in-person courses she taught with Interweave Knitting Labs,  20% of the 25 enrolled students were already taking the online course and wanted to see the class live. Conversely, after the in-person course, several of the in-person students signed up for the online class.

Launching your own course…

Your organization could launch your own courses, adapting the models above as a starting point. The classes can have the side benefit of institutional branding; Woon says students report they feel connected to MoMA after taking the course.

Courses that require heavy involvement from an instructor don’t scale beyond a few dozen students, but they can be very meaningful learning experiences. The MoMA and NYT examples above involve large amounts of time and commitment from both students and the instructor. (Both MoMA and NYT also have self-guided courses that are more like online lecture series, and are more analogous to the Craftsy video series.) In the case of MoMA, there’s also a large up-front investment in video production. The Craftsy model is a slick and appealing presentation when most of the information can be taught by video. Economies of scale with the Craftsy approach allow for lower course fees, and substantially higher revenue.

Updates: 24-Jan: Corrections from Grady and Woon clarifying some details.

The delightful app presents 19 different objects in 3D, to spin and zoom, providing an immediacy that rivals seeing an object in real life. In fact, it’s better in many ways than peering at an object through a protective case because the objects can be spun through a full 360°, view under bright lighting, at high resolution.

Personal exploration

The free app presents the mobile visitor with a grid of objects (below, left):

Tapping any object brings up a spinnable 3D detailed view (above middle). The visitor can spin the object with their fingertip, or pinch to zoom in. Dragging up displays more of the caption, and tapping the corners or the bottom selects other objects.

A brilliant feature (above right) is a display of wax seal from the rear side of a 17th century Milanese painting. Wax seals are hard to make out clearly, but the app allows the user to drag the light source. Moving the light reveals the contours of the wax seal in a way that would otherwise be impossible. The visitor can see a two-headed eagle clutching a sword in one talon, and a royal orb in the other.

For more of a flavor of the app, watch the following 1:45 minute demo from the museum:

“Our hope is that this app provides a level of access and interaction that isn’t always available to the public,” says Nicole Anastasi, Assistant Registrar at UVaM who spearheaded the project.

Escape from behind glass

Anastasi says that museum staff have the “luxury” of handling objects and inspecting them closely from all angles, but visitors can only peer through glass enclosed storage (case at right).

“The iPad offers a degree of access that we’ve never before been able to extend to our audience. Rather than inspecting static images, virtual visitors are now able to “touch” the art and interact with it on a more personal level.  By downloading the UVAM app, iPad users are able to take our collection home with them.”

The app clearly fulfills it’s promise from museum director Bruce Boucher to “give users better access to the objects than simple, static photography, and will enabled details to be appreciated in a way that would challenge the naked eye.” The team did a good job, and the app has been well received. In the last two weeks since launch, it has 5 out of 5 stars in the U.S. app store, and enthusiastic reviews — a real accomplishment since most museum tour apps have been disappointing users.

See the app at iTunes.

How they did it

The app emerged out of discussions between Anastasi and two computer science professors at the university (Abhi Shelat and Jason Lawrence). The computer science professors were in the early stages of launching an app development company, Arqball. “We felt that interactive 3D graphics would help create amazing new educational materials,” says Shelat.

The app was funded internally by the university for an undisclosed budget, and took half a year from idea to completion. The app is free because “as a state institution, we are not allowed to make a profit on such things,” says Boucher. “In addition, we don’t want to limit our audience by naming a price–everyone should have access to the arts without worrying about fees,” adds Anastasi.

Arqball developed a photography rig with a stage, camera and lighting that were all computer-controlled. They capture images of the piece, rotating it a few degrees between shots, and then process the stream of images into a format that can be displayed within the app. Below, the team is photographing a Greek Aryballos, c 600-575 BCE. The Aryballos (flask) is on a white turntable, flanked by two light boxes, and the camera between.

Spinning an object on screen is effective, Shelat explains, because “people are very good at reading depth cues from motion. So a rotating model like ours lets then subconsciously develop their own ‘3D’ model of the piece.”

Other kinds of 3D

The concept of spinning 3D (virtual reality) has been used on the web for years, but it’s surprisingly more intuitive with a fingertip on a tablet than dragging a mouse. Also, an app can contain high-resolution images that would be impractical to display in realtime on the web. UVaM’s app is the first of its kind from a cultural heritage museum.

In the sciences, TouchPress has created a series of well-recieved apps. Shown below are iPad screens from TouchPress’ eBooks about the chemical element gold (left), gold jewelry (middle), and the planet Jupiter (right). Many of the images are fully-rotatable and pinch-zoomable, as in the UVaM app.

Another kind of 3D has recently emerged on handheld devices, using “augmented reality” apps to superimpose 3D into a video of a real scene. A recent app (below) from the Asian Civilisations Museum of Singapore used augmented reality to advertise their summer 2011 Terracotta Warriors exhibition.

The museum promoted the exhibition via publicity flyers, newspaper advertisements, and a display at the Dhoby Ghaut MRT train station, with instructions for commuters to download the free app, and aim their camera at a specially-constructed symbol. Above are four screens from the app. At the train station, a commuter can download the app, point the phone at the symbol. The app translates the symbol into the statue, which can appear alongside real life. Instead of manipulating the 3D using a fingertip, the user tilts and turns the camera, and the statue appears to be standing beside the symbol. The app has 4.5/5 star ratings in the Singapore App Store.

A downside of augmented reality (vs. 3D images like the UVaM app) is that it is designed using realtime video game graphics, not real photography, so the visitors can not critically study the object in detail.

Future directions

Cultural heritage comes to life when the public is given access to the fascinating objects of the past, along with compelling backstories and context. But we can’t wait for publishers like TouchPress to expand their offerings. TouchPress is an interactive eBook publisher with high internal costs, and they need to partner with private collectors or traditional publishers to obtain their content. Their Solar System app cost approx $250,000 to produce, so unlike UVaM, they have to choose sensationalist topics presented at middle school to high school levels, to turn a profit.

We need more organizations like UVaM to create apps that present less common objects of cultural heritage, whether for the general public, or serious scholarship. Over time, as companies like Arqball hone their formula, the development costs will continue to fall, to be within reach of hundreds of museums.

The UVaM app is better than any other cultural heritage app on the market because it was designed to give the public a valuable experience that uses the capabilities of the device. It’s not merely replicating a paper brochure or audio tour.

If you are looking to connect the public with your collection, a great starting point would be to emulate the UVaM app. Building on their approach, you could improve on the model in a few ways:

• Start with an optional, simple, pictorial help screen (example at right), not a letter from the museum director, nor a help video.
• Include more objects, including unique visualizations like the wax seal, or microscopic or X-Ray views. (Using Arqball’s approach, an object takes approximately 20 MB for a high res set of 3D images, so a maximum app size of 2GB corresponds to 100 high res objects.)
• Adapt for the smaller screens of the iPhone or iPod Touch. (UVaM is planning this.)
• Make the captions more interesting (perhaps with a lay-person’s version, and a more academic caption for deeper information). Irrelevant information like accession numbers and copyright reminders can minimized.
• Add a toolbar and use obvious-looking icons.
• Provide adjustable font sizes. This is vital for visually-disabled visitors.
• Get social. Apps should not be closed silos, rather they should allow easy sharing of still images or text by email, Tumblr, Twitter, etc., or saving images to the device’s library or DropBox.
• Collaborate with cultural heritage scientists (who will probably share their content for free). Including some science broadens the appeal of the objects to a wider audience, and enriches visitor’s understanding. See some of the ways of examining artworks at WebExhibits.
• Link your data. Pool together content with other institutions — let’s have thousands of interactive cultural objects by 2015!

Want to make your own 3D app?

“The iPad provides a fantastic platform to showcase the arts. As advances in technology change the way we view and research the arts, its critical to stay current and to be as innovative as possible,” says Anastasi. “Our intent is to expand the 3D collection to hundreds of objects.”

Arqball wants to develop more educational materials that use 3D technology. They have reusable software from the UVaM app, and Shelat says they are trying to drive down costs further “to make this technology available to all museums.” The cost for an app works out to $1-2k per object, for 10-20 objects, and there are economies of scale if there are a lot of objects. Museums can further cut costs if their staff can operate the photography rig themselves.

Source: View of the Dhoby Ghaut MRT station from the terracotta warrior app publisher, Magma Studio. Pictorial help from the Discover app. 

Last night, I attended a presentation about the science and art of beer, which was a great reminder that many commonplace items have fantastic histories and intriguing science. A short selection of lambics, ales, porters, lambics, wheat beers, and so forth gives a culinary window into what ancient peoples drank, how trade, war and regulations influenced brewing, as well microbiology and basic chemistry. From the invite:

…beer director Greg Engert [pdf] of ChurchKey fame … will explain how brewing the perfect beer is as much science as it is art… From hops to froth, he’ll explain the scientific principles of beer brewing including how complex chemical reactions effect the flavor, color and aroma of a beer’s style. He’ll teach us the carbonation and gas laws of conditioning beer and the role temperature plays in the quality of a brew.

Some universities have multidisciplinary courses on beer, and there are lectures (e.g., Illinois Science Council has a series this year on the chemistry of beer, whisky and chocolate; OMSI had a 3-day event last year in partnership with the Rogue Brewing Company; the Museum of Life + Science in Durham has a evening event; and Adventure Science Center in Nashville had an evening event last year). These science events could be enhanced with some extra history and culture.

These are great ways to engage the public in thinking deeper about the culture and science of everyday things. For kids, the same could be done with ice cream, soda, candy and many other topics.

IDEA’s second mobile app, WikiNodes (see app store link) puts the encyclopedic knowledge of Wikipedia at the fingertips of iPad users. Articles are displayed as nodes that can be touched, dragged and spun around — showing the relations between articles and sections of articles. The app is currently featured in Apple’s app store.

Here’s a 30 second demo:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdiXXxMnqJQ

The app is based on IDEA’s SpicyNodes system for displaying and navigating information using nodes (see SpicyNodes.org). The SpicyNodes approach has great potential for other subjects, from browsing museum collections and archives, to browsing flora & fauna, and many other kinds of linked data.

Encyclopedias contain large amounts of interlinked information — which is begging for a creative and engaging visualization. Tap any node, and it expands to give you more information. Or, switch to a full-page view to display articles as pages, then scroll up and down. Nodes link together sections of Wikipedia articles and related topics, making Wikipedia come to life. Browse in a way that mimics how you look for things in the real world.

Tablets are the new frontier for conveying art and science to the public. Industry analysts estimate that by the end of 2012, there will be 100-120 million tablets. IDEA will produce apps for whatever platforms have the lion’s share of the market.

Getting a new app noticed by the world is a huge challenge, as the app store is flooded with hundreds of new apps every day, of varying quality. Our download rates increased by more than 10x when featured by Apple as a “New and Noteworthy” app on their iTunes main screen.

Upcoming features for the app include multilingual support (many users are in non-English speaking countries), and other enhancements to browsing (e.g., bookmarks and more linked nodes). The app is currently free, but not for long.

The premise of the “You Make Me Sick!” online game, which won a $50k prize last week from the National STEM Video Game Challenge, is that middle school kids invent an pathogen and fight the immune system — learning science along the way. The game steps players through several stages: briefing them on the habits and weaknesses of a target human, devising an evil pathogen (e.g., a virus or bacterium with different transmission means, shapes and characteristics), and playing a short arcade game in the lungs or guts of the human — battling the pathogen against immune cells.

About the game

The charming game hopes to engage kids in the process of infection, and familiarize them with attributes of pathogens and how infections occur.

The game is designed so that kids who don’t like to read or have trouble deciphering text can learn some microbiology. Dr. Matthew Marino, an assistant professor of special education at Washington State University worked on the education aspects of the game. Since learning abilities are a continuum, Marino says, “Our hypothesis is that if you build a game that addresses the unique challenges students with disabilities face, all students will benefit because the design will account for the wide range of diversity that is present in every class.”

The game fits typical curriculum standards of middle school (ages 11-14) science classrooms, and is intended to “motivate, engage, and teach a diverse range of students about science.” It’s online, running in web browsers with Adobe Flash version 10, and works on virtually all web browsers in the U.S. The game play itself is a little confusing and the arcade functions are cumbersome, but the overall design successfully draws gamers through, to experience the interplay between the pathogen and the host’s immune system.

The business model

The game is currently free, though the publisher, Madison, Wisc. based Filament Games, plans to bundle a suite of middle school science games spanning life, Earth, and physical science, and put them behind an “affordable” paywall.

The primary source of funding is from the U.S. Department of Education, via their Institute of Education Sciences’ Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The SBIR program funds commercial ventures that “directly or indirectly lead to improved student learning and academic achievement” but which can’t self-fund because they require too much research or the revenue potential is too small. The contract was awarded to Filament, for $838k. They have 2.5 years to make “six life science computer games on topics including cells, heredity, evolution, bacteria, plants, and the human body.” Filament was also awarded a $150k SBIR from NSF to make games targeting the physical sciences.

Still, it’s a labor of love. The SBIR contracts don’t fully compensate for the team’s time. Marino says, “the project is taking a great deal of time and energy. I stopped keeping track of the hours. It was depressing but we’re doing it for the students and that is our reward.”

Video game prize

The game leapt to notoriety because it won $50k in a science video game competition last week. The prize was organized by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and publisher E-Line Media, riding on publicity from President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign. One part of the prize challenged middle-school students to design video games on any topic (some of which dealt with science themes). Brian Alspach, vice president of E-Line Media is excited about kids doing game development, saying “we believe that the very act of designing a game has powerful implications for STEM learning.” The second part of the prize challenged emerging and experienced game developers like Filament.

The prize organizers had the support of the White House, which promoted the contest on their blog, as well as several nonprofits who promoted the contest via their existing channels. Thanks to that free publicity, the youth prize had 525 entries from imaginative kids (see the youth winners); and 50 entries from emerging and experienced game developers. Last week, Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, announced a dozen youth winners, and two developer winners.

For Filament, the $50k was an unexpected windfall. Their SBIR contract was awarded in July 2010, two months before the challenge was announced, so they had started development already. Filament submitted their web-based game on a whim, since it did not fully comply with the rules of 4-person teams creating mobile-based video games for young children, grades pre-K through 4^th. (Filament’s game is not mobile, targets older children, and had a 4-person development team plus several others who chipped in with planning, design, artwork and the soundtrack.) But it turned out that the contest rules were flexible, and contest officials loved the game.

The competition was funded by sponsors (AMD Foundation, ESA and Microsoft): $50k for Filament, $50k to a team of graduate students, plus a dozen laptop computers to the youth winners and $24k for schools.

Games for learning

The success of the approach for this game is still unknown. The series of games are designed around the Universal Design For Learning (UDL) framework, which the team hopes will help meet the needs of all students. But Marino says, “the teaching methods within the game need additional empirical research.” “There is very little research about how to transfer empirically validated strategies from the classroom into a game.” They will test the games by comparing learning outcomes among kids that play the game vs. kids that are taught via conventional means.

Meanwhile, Marino and Filament are continuing with the game pipeline. Their next game, “Prisoner of Echo” is about sound, and comes out next month.

Check out the “You Make Me Sick!” online game yourself!

Update 7-Apr-11: Clarified details about Filament’s contest submission; corrected SBIR contract details.

One popular type of game is a miniature scavenger hunt, called “location-gaming.” The premise is that players go places (e.g., a restaurant or park), do fast, simple tasks (like typing something into their phone, or uploading a photo of something), and win a reward (the reward can  virtual “points,” or something tangible, like a free postcard or sandwich). Other types of games are more thematic, such as creating playing-card “battles” between characters that appear in art.

SCVNGR

The leading platform for location-gaming is SCVNGR, which recently reached over 1 million users (people who have used the app on iPhone and Android phones) and has been funded with $15 million from Google and other venture funds.

SCVNGR’s business model centers on collecting fees from merchants who want customers to come to their businesses to play and receive rewards. In an interview with GigaOM, SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch said that SCVNGR analyzed its data and found that it takes three visits by a consumer before they are likely to become a regular at a business or at least have that merchant at the top of their mind. For businesses, paying SCVNGR is a form of advertising.

Kellian Adams, the company’s museum education technologist presented SCVNGR to an audience of museum staff. The conference attendees were mostly unfamiliar with SCVNGR: according to a realtime poll, 46% had never heard of it, 40% had heard of it but never played, and only 6% have created a game with their tool.

Kellian said that SCVNGR can work for museums, with some adjustments. She said, “Originally I would just give museums SCVNGR access and tell them to have a nice day but it really didn’t work. People weren’t playing, the games weren’t so great so SCVNGR tasked me to make sure everything that happened at a museum was good.” In her presentation, she suggested that prizes like sunglasses and glowsticks are good for motivating gamers, and emphasized that regardless of the game design, the most common demographic is 18-35 year olds.

For History, Kellian said, “a great way to use SCVNGR is to connect history with modern locations,” with a quest that takes visitors to various locations in a community. It can also work well for science topics when visitors have distances to walk, such as in a zoo or botanical garden. (See a detailed article by Charles Outhier about SCVNGR at the National Zoo, and further discussion of SCVNGR for museums.)

Hide&Seek

For other kinds of games, London-based Hide&Seek, showcased their first art museum app, Tate Trumps, a card-game based app in which different paintings at the Tate Modern do battle, are collected, or examined by ‘mood.’ The free game is designed to be played while visitors are inside of the Tate Modern. As the Tate explains, “In Battle mode, you need to ask yourself the question, ‘If this artwork came to life, how good would it be in a fight?’. In Mood mode, you’re looking for artworks you think are menacing, exhilarating or absurd. Or, if you wish you had a gallery of your own, try Collector mode, and find pictures which are famous, recently produced or practical to house. Once you’ve formed your collection, meet up with your friends, and play a fun game of trumps to see who did the best.”

According to Peter Law, development producer & creative project manager for Hide&Seek, games “can be used as marketing tools, to reach new audiences, or to change how people enjoy the galleries.” He says, “More than 20,000 games of Tate Trumps were played in the first two months after launch.” In the UK App Store, the app has 1020 ratings, averaging 2/5 stars; the most recent version fixes some bugs and has 23 ratings averaging 2.5/5 stars.

Law is enthusiastic about the future of mobile games for museums, saying, “Museums are really interesting right now. They’re looking for new ways to engage people and to encourage them to experience their collections.” His company makes a variety of games, and can readily adapt the format of Tate Trumps for other collections.

Web sites for mobile devices (web apps)

The easiest way to go mobile is to have a web site formatted for the small screen — often called a “web app.” Robert Pyles, CEO of TourSphere, advocates for web apps, saying “part of the mission of museums is maximum accessibility, and reaching as many people as possible,” which he says web apps allow. They are easier to edit than native apps, and will work on future devices that don’t exist yet. The downsides  are that devices need to be online to work (either on the cellular network, or by installing wireless routers in the museum), and interactivity is limited compared to a native app.

These companies offer web-based content management systems (akin to a blog engine) for quickly making mobile-friendly web sites.

TourSphere — For $399/month, no contracts, they will give you a web site at their domain, e.g., YourMuseum.TourSphere.com, with several templates, a media manager, maps, multiple languages, links to your current site via RSS, keypad navigation, surveys, and some other features. Pyles says, “Depending on the complexity of the app you can do get something going in one to three days.” Customers can make a full backup of all their data and images. Their sister company, Audissey Media, offers audio/video production, providing an easy way to produce additional content. They plan to launch a public beta next month at Museums and the Web 2011, and also plan to make native apps.

Guide by Cell — The “MOBI site” product produces a bare-bones mobile web site. Using an online administrative site, museum staff chooses items, uploads media (e.g., audio tour recordings), and enters text. The visitor’s interface on the phone is a scrollable list of items, which can be objects or topics. The system is suitable for a few dozen pages/topics. Pricing not disclosed.

Kanvasys — Offers web-formatted web sites, edited via their CMS. Pricing not disclosed.

Alternatives: A cheap and easy alternative to these services is to use the WordPress blog engine and the $40 WPtouch plugin. You can set up any suite of pages and posts, browsable by tag, delivering information and a tour. (You would not have keypad navigation, surveys or other interactive features of TourSphere.) If you want to put an extensive collection onto mobile devices, you’ll probably need a collection management system. Two options are the mobile plugins for the open-source Omeka, or using custom plugins and themes in the commercial, cloud-based eHive.

Native apps — semi automated

Native apps can be a better experiences than web apps. The apps can be preloaded on rental iPods at a museum, or downloaded to visitor’s phones/tablets, ready to launch. Apps are popular: There are currently 369k apps for Apple devices (77k publishers); 295k apps for Android devices; and 11k apps for Windows 7 devices (4k publishers).

Native apps are expensive and time consuming to create from scratch. Costs rapidly exceed $20k for a small app, and the development process strips museum staff of control. Costs are inflated because app development is new (since March 2008 for Apple, and August 2008 for Android), so there are fewer app programmers than web developers (since the mid 1990s).

To cut costs and speed development, several companies offer a semi-automated, modular approach, in which content and programming are separate. Museum staff can create the content (via a Content Management System, CMS), and the vendor’s programmers create a placeholder-based app with fixed bins for content. The app consists of filling the predefined bins with content from the CMS. Vendors differ in the features they offer (audio tours, calendar, panoramic images, movies, etc.), how much time it takes for updates to reach the app (instantaneous or a few days), the underlying speed and elegance of their user interfaces.

GuideOne — Their CMS is called “G1 Curator CMS” and they only target Apple devices. Their preset modules include: audio tours, zoomable floor maps and images, scavenger hunts and quizzes, membership/donation features, and links to social networks. According to Juan Sanabria, head of product development. the costs vary widely, from $12k to over $100k, with a typical price around $25k. They don’t have standardized pricing yet. Their apps are used on the floor in museums, and are not in the app store. The Detroit Institute of Arts has been distributing iPads with their app since March 2010, the Chrysler Museum of Art has been distributing a fleet of iPods since mid February 2011. An app related to Alaskan Natives is launching later this year.

Kanvasys — Based in Gatineau, Québec. Offers a variety of services for iOS and Android. The costs vary widely, from $8k to over $100k, with a typical price around $25k. Their free Eco-Odyssée app was released in Dec 2010, but has fewer than 3 ratings. They have 3 more apps available later this year. Their apps work online and offline, and content can be edited via a web-based CMS.

LookBackMaps — Free. Created by Jon Voss in 2008, this system was designed to provide mobile access to historical photos in various online archives. Museums or archives can create an account, and submit photos, location info (lat/lon), and some other meta data, and the site will make the image available to users via their mobile web site. The app has 3/5 stars rating in the Apple App Store.

MobileXpeditions —  Based in Dublin, OH. The company founders previously ran a Macintosh development company. Their first museum app is in the works for Ohio’s COSI (Center of Science and Industry). According to co-founder Mark Gilicinski, they are not sure about pricing, but hope to charge around $10k or less for apps. They are building a CMS. They currently have one art-related iPad app, which is used on Celebrity Cruise lines as a walking tour of contemporary art on their Solstice ships (2,850 passengers).

NOUSguide — Coming from a background of creating handheld audio guides for European museums, Nousguide has made the jump to commodity hardware. According to CEO Alexander Stickelberger, “we have long term relationships with our clients, and all of them shifted to the Apple iOS or Android devices.” NOUS can deliver apps (see list), or a full package with sturdy cases for an iPod Touch. NOUS has an extra focus on accessability, and has incorporated sign language in several apps. They also design the apps to work with or without network coverage. Stickelberger says the costs for an app for the app store is in the ballpark of $10-25k. That includes streaming content, and various interactive features. Adding their Mac-based CMS, the “NOUS Conductor CMS” in their all-in-one solution adds $25k.

NOUS’ SFMOMA Rooftop Garden iPod/iPhone app is free, released Jan 2010, has accumulated 33 ratings in 14 months, 3/5 stars; the sister iPad app released April 2010, also free, has 79 ratings, 3/5 stars. Stickelberger says their Red Bull Hangar-7 museum app has a couple thousand downloads every week. They publish apps under their name, and also white label under the brands of museums. Approx 50 apps are public (in the app stores), and another 100+ are distributed only within a museum.

Toura — Depending on the features and the target devices (Apple or Android), program director Chris Alexander said the cost is approx $5-20k, negotiated per client. According to their marketing rep, Christina Daigneault, the cost depends on how many apps a museum buys, the features they activate, which platforms (Apple and/or Android), and how long they want the app to be in the app store. When museum staff is done creating content with the CMS, with two-day turnaround, Toura programmers deliver a working app which can be tested or submitted to an app store. Currently, Toura has published 21 apps in the Apple app store, and 11 in the Android app store.

Toura’s most popular app is British Library: Treasures. The app was featured in Apple’s app store in mid January and was a top education app, but as is typical, download rates plummeted when it was no longer featured. The $4 iPhone app has 10 reviews in the UK and US, averaging 3.9/5 stars. The $6 iPad app has 41 reviews, averaging 3.3/5 stars; the Android versions have 35 ratings, and a rating of 2.5/5. The second most popular app is French Impressionism at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has 14 ratings in the Apple app store, 3.3/5 stars; and 11 ratings in the Android store, 4/5 stars. According to the Android marketplace, both Android apps have been purchased between 100-500 times.

Native apps — fully outsourced

To make a totally custom app, museums will hire design/development firms. This is costs more, makes edits harder if not impossible, and can yield better results. Often these companies have a pool of source code they can re-use from project to project.

LookBackMaps — Based in San Francisco. Jon Voss’ team also offers simple native apps, starting at $1-2k. Their first custom app for Historic New Orleans was released earlier this month.

Nousguide — NOUS, listed above, also offers full development services.

Tristan Interactive —Their free Infinity of Nations app for Smithsonian was released October 2010, has 13 ratings, 3.5/5 stars. Their free Canadian Museum of Civilization app, released Dec 2010 has 32 ratings, and 3.5/5 stars. Pricing not disclosed.

Alternative: The field is expanding. There are currently 77k publishers for apps on Apple devices. There are other museum-focused app developers (see vendors at MW2011 in April), and thousands of generic developers.

Audio production

Regardless of the methods used, if you have audio or video, someone has to produce it. The vendor, Earprint Productions, promoted their content design, audio production and digital storytelling. They have worked with several museums.

Alternative: If you write scripts in-house, tons a great voice talent can be easily auditioned and hired within a matter of days via voice123.com. Those audio producers will deliver great audio, inexpensively. Many voices are seasoned radio announcers. I’ll cover games in a follow up article.

Games

Another type of app is games, which can be appealing for some museums. Two vendors who showed their games are SCVNGR and Hide&Seek.

Update: Added new data for NOUS. Update 2: and Kanvasys.