I think it’s safe to say that museums have the advantage over performing arts venues when it comes to integrating digital technology. The range of possibilities seems almost endless and some museums are really on the cutting edge of developing user-friendly mobile applications that truly enhance the museum-going experience.
This article in Mashable highlights the efforts of the Smithsonian in DC, The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Each museum has dedicated both monetary and staff resources to effectively incorporate mobile technology in an effort to add a deeper level of user engagement with museum visitors. The days of just holding up the telephone-like audio guide and punching in numbers of artworks while wandering through the galleries are coming to an end. Now, you don’t even have to be geographically near the museum to be able to experience its collections.
It will be interesting to assess the landscape in a few years and see if these new interactive technologies have resulted in an increase in museum visitors, or if the availability of all this information through mobile platforms will supplant the need to visit the physical site of the collection. I don’t think that the actual experience of being in a museum can ever be duplicated, but these new tools do provide a rich resource in terms of educational materials that can be shared in classrooms around the world that do not have the same access.
No comments:
Post a Comment