From Arduino to Exhibit?

Remember back in kindergarten, when your day largely consisted of playing at different centers?  I was a big fan of the block and sand centers, where I could build things and get my hands a little bit dirty.  While grad school seems far removed from my kindergarten days, it seems as though I am returning to my roots.

This semester, I am taking an Interactive Exhibit Design Class that is really like one big kindergarten learning center - just increase the complexity by 100 000 000.  In learning how to make interactive historical exhibits, we get to explore and experiment with different technologies, computer languages, and codes. So far this has mostly involved playing with something called an arduino.

What is an arduino you ask?

Basically, it is a little electronic chip that we can (or will learn to) manipulate to do really cool things.  Or if you want the technical version, it is "an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software." (For a more in depth explanation check out this blog.)

So you are probably wondering what kind of cool things this little chip of wonder can do.  So far, my partner Sushima and I have only been able to make it perform a few small functions. 

Hooking the arduino up to an LED light is the most basic function you can perform, but we have also learned to control this light with a switch and a pontentiometer (like a dimmer switch).  The highlight of the class last week was using the arduino to play a little jingle through an attached speaker.  We were so excited about this accomplishment that we spent the remainder of the class trying to make the arduino play different songs - specifically the Super Mario theme song.

An electronic chip that can turn on lights and and play jingles may seem quite unrelated to the historical discipline. I will readily admit that I don't know all of the arduinos capabilities, but I do know that it is extremely versatile.  I'll tell you how I imagine an arduino will be able to help me design an exhibit.

First of all, my exhibit will consist of a suitcase - probably from the early 1900s.  Perhaps it will look something like this:

When you open the suitcase, you will see an assortment of different items belonging to an immigrant, perhaps a letter, a musical instrument, some clothes, a few books and maybe some children's toys.  These items help to tell the story of the immigrant's journey to Canada, but are probably not too interesting just to look at.  This is where the arduino comes in.

Imagine that you open the suitcase and it literally tells you its story.  Press a button and hear the letter being read aloud.  Press another button and the musical instrument plays a song.  Turn a switch and the toys begin to move around.  You get the idea?  These are the sorts of things that an arduino can help accomplish in an interactive exhibit. 

While these are just some preliminary ideas that require further development, I am looking forward to manipulating the arduino to see if any of this can be accomplished.  If not, it is good to know that we have been given permission to make mistakes and fail in the most spectacular way possible. 

Thanks to Heather Rivet and Adriana Ayers for their great ideas about how to make the suitcase idea more interesting!

Seeing History through a New Lens (and Looking Cool While Doing It!)

The next time you embark on a tour of your favourite historical site, park, or landmark, you may not want to forget your sunglasses.  Now these wouldn't be your regular run of the mill sunglasses that merely protect your eyes and show off your style.  Rather, they would be history-enhancing sunglasses, allowing you to see what no longer exists in front of you.  Imagine that you are walking along the rue du Petit-Champlain in Quebec City.  It would probably look similar to the image below.

Quite charming, isn't it? However, as an educated individual, you know that the rue du Petit-Champlain didn't always look this way and you wish there was some way to experience the changes to this historic road over time.  That is where your sunglasses come in.

When you put on your sunglasses, they take a scan of your immediate surroundings and send  a digital image to a photographic database over a 3G network.  The database matches the scanned photo to historical digitized images of the same location and then proceeds to project those images onto the lenses of your sunglasses.  The image is thus overlaid onto your vision of the actual surroundings, allowing you to see change over time. In this case, the sunglasses retrieve the following images:

 1880

 1916

1923

1978

While these sunglasses are only a hypothetical invention in my attempt to marry an everyday object with an interactive historical element, I was inspired by technology that already exists.  In imagining how these sunglasses might find appropriate photographs, I thought of Google's feature that allows you to drag images into the search bar to find visually similar images.  I tested this search feature using the first image displayed above and it was successful in finding other images of the rue du Petit-Champlain. However, the older images did not appear in the results. 

Another technology that came to mind in thinking about this project is the augmented reality device showing the digital reconstruction of Yuanmingyuan garden.  The original garden structures were looted and burned by French-Anglo forces in 1860 and were left to deteriorate.  You can still see the ruins today, or you can look through the augmented reality viewer developed by the Beijing Institute of Technology to see a digitally reconstructed view of the original structures. The video below demonstrates the process.

With these technologies in mind, the sunglasses do not seem entirely implausible.  Just don't hold your breath waiting for them to show up at your nearest Wal-Mart.