Are museums ready to play in the digital age? Rapid advances in technology are making the traditional audiotour increasingly redundant, and visitors are now offered sophisticated multimedia tours on PDAs, iPods and even mobile phones.

The conference was aimed at museum workers who want to know more about how the new generation of mobile devices can benefit their institutions.

The conference was preceded by a workshop for museum professionals who have in-depth experience of handhelds and related mobile interpretation systems. The outcomes of the discussion fed into the public conference - represented by mind-map drawings and the panel discussions that followed the keynote presentations.

Additional iphone museum tour links.

Why Green WiFi? A number of entities focus on addressing the digital divide by providing internet access to developing areas. Green WiFi addresses one of the biggest barriers to success: the lack of reliable electricity in developing areas required to power the network. Green WiFi has developed a low cost, solar-powered, standardized WiFi access solution that runs out-of-the-box with no systems integration or power requirements. All that is required is a single source of broadband access. Green WiFi nodes can then be deployed on rooftops to form a self-healing network that hops the source signal over a virtual 802.11b/g grid. Because these nodes require no fixed installation or power tie-ins, these nodes can form an unplanned, mobile grid that can grow or be relocated as needed. Green WiFi aims to complement and extend the power and promise of initiatives such as the UN/MIT One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, Intel’s World Ahead Program and other NGO efforts dedicated to providing affordable computing capabilities to developing areas by providing critical last mile access; last mile internet access with nothing more than a single broadband internet connection, rooftops and the sun.

The Green Wifi Prototype

This prototype #2 was assembled using a PVC frame. The testing is underway on the roof of Bruce’s home’s roof in San Francisco, California. During the month of March 2006, we had record rain of 27 out of 30 days, so was a good test for weak sun levels and cloudy days.

The Meraki Solar mesh repeater enables you to provide wireless coverage over large outdoor areas quickly, and without the expense associated with running power cables. It is also integrated with Meraki Dashboard, enabling you to monitor and configure your solar unit remotely. Each unit is completely self-contained and ready to mount on roofs, poles, or anywhere else the sun shines. The Solar is completely energy independent and runs on its own state-of-the-art solar-charged battery.

Features & Benefits

Cover Hard to Reach Areas

The Solar is ideal for providing coverage to remote or hard to get to places. Whether you have just a few access points that are hard to wire, or an entire area without power (e.g., fair grounds, parks and rural areas), Meraki Solar can be deployed quickly to extend your wireless network.

Reduce Hassle and Planning

Even when existing power sources are available, the time required to plan for and secure rights to that power may be prohibitively expensive. In a business district, for example, each building rooftop or storefront is owned by a different entity, and securing permission from each owner can be time consuming and complex. With the Solar, you need time on the roof, but you do not need access to local power.

Save Time and Money

In many cases the single most expensive line item in an Outdoor network installation is the time and material required to cable and install an access point. The Solar drastically reduces this cost, requiring only 30 minutes of a trade-level installer. Since there are no electrical or network cabling runs, there are no electricians involved. This translates into a significant cost savings in many applications.

Solar is Green

The Meraki Solar runs on its own state-of-the-art solar-charged battery, and requires no connection to the local electrical grid. The Solar is incredibly energy efficient and has limited impact on the environment.

LACMA has created a dynamic multimedia visitor tour offering a wealth of audio, video, still images, and text to enrich your knowledge of artworks from the museum’s collection. The tour is available now via personal digital assistants (PDAs)—with full-color screens and simple controls—that can be checked out free of charge from the museum’s welcome centers.

Here’s how the tour works: You select an artwork in the gallery, enter the corresponding number on a touch screen, and listen to a brief audio introduction to the work. You are then invited to view the color screen for narrated images and video providing the inside story about numerous aspects of the work—everything from artist and medium to subject and historical context. It’s a cool and interactive way to learn about the masterpieces of the LACMA collection, in-depth and at your own pace.

And that’s only the beginning. As you move through the galleries you can bookmark your favorite works, saving them to a customized account created automatically when you check out the PDA. Then when you get home, or anywhere with an Internet connection, you can log on to lacma.org and enter your own three-dimensional virtual gallery, already stocked with the artworks you’ve selected. Don’t like the arrangement? That’s okay—you can move them. Or examine them up close, access more information from Collections Online, or replay the related multimedia tours.

The multimedia tour will be rolled out in three phases, with the first phase involving thirty-one works from the modern art collection. Works from additional collection areas will be added in phases two and three, set for late 2008 and early 2009.

The multimedia tour is supported by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation.

The system will “build the internet of things,” letting you add an RFID tag to anything you like and associate it with a webpage or application. You’ll be able to pick up the Tikitag reader and ten tikitags for $50 on October 1st. tikitag

tikitag in use