A crucial first step in the process of engaging visitors is bringing text and images out from behind the glass of an exhibit and into a more interactive setting. While physical interactions with the specimens are possible in very select cases, these interactions require the oversight of a museum employee or volunteer. The Peabody already has taken steps to that effect, with touchscreen kiosks in both the Great Hall and Human Origins exhibit, but there are clear points for further growth and innovation.
First, the underlying technology of touchscreens has taken enormous strides in recent years. Personal experimentation with the screens currently installed quickly revealed that of the two installed in the Human Origins exhibit, one is inaccurate by almost four inches while the other does not register touch input at all and cannot be moved off of the starting screen. The screen in the Great Hall has large speakers lining the sides which play an unprompted audio introduction to every new display of information. In an often quiet and contemplative space, the sudden and unexpected sound can be jarring and off-putting to both users of the system and passive visitors elsewhere in the Hall.
These old implementations of touchscreen kiosks may not have aged gracefully, but their information density is an indispensable tool in a museum like the Peabody. Even with the huge increase in exhibit space, the museum has vastly more artifacts than can ever be displayed in the physical exhibit halls, and many items have much more information to explore than can fit on a placard. Touchscreens help alleviate these issues, since one screen can effectively be many multiples of its area worth of information. Beyond that, with the right data management system the information can be updated in an instant and a library of content can be easily rotated through the museum, enabling much faster turnover of exhibits without needing to fabricate new physical signage for every iteration.
With the need to use such screens in the space, a look at current touchscreen technology reveals how far the products have come. One of the industry leaders is Ideum,2 which offers large-scale touchscreen tables (referred to as touch tables), and more conventional angled screens. Most of their products feature integrated computing, eliminating the need to build space for a concealed computer to route information to the screens. They also support usage by up to eight users at a time, reducing the wait time for visitors to access the information. Contrast this with the screen in the Great Hall, where the usage pattern generally consists of one group at a time using the screen to page through information without others being able to either use the screen or even see what is being explored. A touch table breaks out of the historical use of these types of exhibits as desktop-style browsing by one user. Instead, a dynamic user interface can allow information to “float” around the screen, with different stages of the information intermingled. This approach supports many users are looking at the same elements of the content at once (for example, the case of a group all reading the introduction), or each user exploring what interests them (each guest wants to learn about the discovery of a different specimen). The content can be freely rotated and sized on the screen based on the orientation of the user and varying visual needs.
While many of Ideum’s products are industry-standard and mostly building upon previous iterations of touchscreen technology, their Tangible Engine software3 is a leader in merging physical objects with capacitive touchscreens. By placing unique patterns of conductive material onto small puck-like bases, the program can identify physical items when placed directly on the touch table without a seperate identification system like RFID and an overhead tracking system with cameras, which was the previous standard way to achieve such a physical interaction with the screen output. These bases can either be representative (such as if they were printed with images of different dinosaurs), or literal, providing the item in question is relatively small, such as a shell or 3D print of a specimen. Since the bases are identified both in content, location, and orientation, users can select a physical model they are interested in, place it on the screen, and information appears around it. The user can then twist the base to orient the information to them, or pass it to another user to look at on a different part of the same screen.
This particular iteration of the touchscreen evolution is particularly appropriate for a museum like the Peabody, where there is such a huge catalogue of items that can fit in Petri-like containers. As shown in Figure 1.1, the interaction of small specimens with the screen and the resulting touch menus that spread out of it is entrancing. Imagine an exhibit on shells where the visitors can select an shell that interests them and see the environment it came from spring to life on the screen around it, with information about the species, as well as the other elements it is connected to in the ecosystem and directions to where those elements are located elsewhere in the museum.
This technology can also be used to create interactive gamification, as shown by the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium in Montreal.4 Their EXO exhibit features several round screens representing Earth right after its creation. By placing pucks of different graphics onto the screen, visitors can add meteor collisions that bring water, microorganisms to the oceans, greenhouse gases to build up the atmosphere, and finally manipulate the digital globe to see their handiwork.
Simply updating the existing touchscreens in the museum to more modern specification is a necessary step to take advantage of the information density they offer, but augmenting the experience with physical elements creates an extremely powerful interactive tool while maintaining the Peabody’s focus on physical artifacts. It does enlarge the size of the screens in the space, but the number of users also drastically increases and encourages more personalized exploration of the information on hand.
Though the Peabody currently features a few touchscreens described above, the vast majority of informational elements of the museum space use conventional, non-dynamic methods such as printed signs, placards, and diagrams. To be clear, this paper does not seek to fully replace every instance of such information. The density of the information provided by digital signage can be a double-edged sword: too much of it could overwhelm guests and keep them from interacting at all. There is an inherent beauty to clean, physical signs, especially in the context of historical exhibits where screens can be anachronistic. Furthermore, the nature of traditional screens means that the traditional lighting angle is reversed. That is, instead of lights pointing at signs and placards, the primary light source comes from the screen itself. This gives the curators less control over the intensity and brightness of a space, since direct light onto a screen is almost always disruptive, with very specific exceptions.
Consider David Friend Hall if each mineral’s information was provided by a small screen: the striking darkness and contemplative nature of the space would be drastically affected. For this reason, museum-wide adoption of traditional, backlit screens for all text display is not preferable.
However, there do exist non-backlit digital displays that may be more suitable called “digital paper”.This technology was popularized by the Amazon Kindle, which showcased its major features: it is a passive display, meaning it only consumes power to change the current screen output and otherwise is off, and matte surface interacting naturally with ambient light. These two features make digital paper an ideal solution to dynamically updating signage in a space while maintaining full control of the lighting environment and minimizing power consumption. The battery-powered options from Visix5 can last up to 10,000 updates, which makes the power supply about as future-proofed as possible for battery replacement while removing any additional wiring challenges and allowing for movement to different parts of the museum. The Visix signs are updated by a Radio-Frequency (RF) transmitter, and can be used to probe the current battery life of signs to proactively replace batteries in the case of failures. For a Peabody looking to reimagine itself as a dynamic, constantly evolving space, easy changeable signage without wasteful reprinting seems to be a must. Beyond the functional elements, though, it is not hard to imagine an implementation of digital paper as a more interactive element in a gallery where low light levels are required, as long as the information is not in color or animated.
There are other areas of the museum where the intention of the current conventional signage is ready-made for update by animated content on screens. Consider the various dioramas in the Peabody: they all have images similar to Figure 1.2, with a sketch of the diorama overlayed with labels and a corresponding key with information about the flora and fauna inside. Imagine instead a high-resolution picture of the diorama on a small touchscreen with understated outlining around the items of interest. In much less space, the screen can provide all the information of the conventional image while avoiding the deciphering stage and can be coupled with minor gamification to increase interaction with the dioramas themselves. This could take the form of an I-Spy-style game where the screen can prompt visitors to find a certain number of animals or types of animals within the diorama and show correct answers. Additionally, the difference between independently looking at the dioramas and hearing about them from an experienced curator is dramatic. The design of these exhibits is a historical marvel of the Peabody, and there would be great value in bringing attention not only to the individual specimens but the layered storylines within. With digital signage, visitors can discover a different drama each time they visit, as they are prompted to notice the bird distracting a predator from her nest one day, and the perfectly camouflaged butterfly on the tree trunk the next.
With a more focused eye on the possibilities of digital 2D content within the Peabody, there are significant opportunities to increase visitor interaction, both directly in the functionality of existing exhibits and also by streamlining exhibit cycling, making the museum’s content equally engaging each visit. Though traditional screens are by no means always the answer to conventional signage, digital paper can combine the best of both worlds in certain situations.