The handheld PDA tour was created as an interpretive aid for the Detroit Industry murals permanent installation at the Detroit Institute of Art. It incorporates audio, video, photos and animations to deliver both led and interactive experiences for visitors.

The tour combines efficient interface architecture with a rich collection of content designed to be non-intrusive and flexible to the user, ultimately creating a tour that allows visitors to feel that they can immerse themselves in the murals rather than feel “captive” by the device.

This is one of the first handheld museum tours to harness the potential of the new generation of robust portable media devices like the Nokia N800. The tour allows for interactivity and delivery of video, photos and audio that before now could not be delivered without a full-fledged computer and web browser.

Sourcelab once again enlisted the coding, animation, and technical expertise of Scine to produce the Flash application that ran on the Nokia device. This was Scine’s first ‘offline’ mobile application. Many technical challenges were presented as the implementation of the Flash player on the Nokia had some shortcomings.

We developed an online version of the application, it is shown here to give an idea of the experience but pales in comparison to actually interacting with the device itself in front of the Diego Rivera murals. All media files were located on the device itself so we had a lot of flexibility in creating large animations and including large videos which load relatively slow when seen in its online incarnation. Read more to see more images of the application.

Link: http://sourcelab.us/riveracourt/ (note: slow to load, shown only for reference)

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