Detroit Institute of Arts PDA Tour
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)
Detail: Language Selection
Detail showing the first frame of the introduction animation
Detail: Tour Home, user can choose to go on predefined narrated tours or choose to explore the murals on their own and choose the mural area’s they want to learn more about
Detail: User chooses to go on the first narrated tour titled “A Web of Imagery”
Detail: The main tour screen where the user listens to a narrator describe specific topics in Diego Rivera’s Mural work
Detail: When a cue point in the timeline is reached the user is presented with relevant archival footage and photographs. Here archival footage of Rivera’s fresco technique creating one of the Detroit Institute Murals
Detail: At the end of each narrated tour the user is presented with a gallery of related photos and films, as well as being prompted to move onto the next chapter of the tour.
Detail: User chooses to view film footage of Rivera at work (Frida Kahlo can be seen to his left)