Museum Virtual Worlds

Our upcoming “mixed reality” video screening event, Fabricated Realities, which will occur on January 24th at our museum in San Francisco and on Exploratorium Island in Second Life, poses some unique technical challenges.  Like other public programs for which we’ve created a virtual counterpart, we’re taking advantage of things we’ve learned before and techniques and processes we’ve developed.  We’ve scaled back part of the initial plan for what videos signals will be digitally encoded for streaming into SL, but will keep those elements in mind for future cinema arts related programs.

In this event, we’ll combine two audiences, one real, one virtual, to hopefully create an integrated experience where a filmmaker can interact with people in front of him and avatars projected alongside.  Both audiences will view the artist’s  documentary shown on a screen in front of them at almost nearly the same time.  Only a slight delay of a few seconds occurs when we encode video and stream it into the virtual world. Wayne Grim, one of my colleague’s at the Exploratorium, created a theater configuration diagram and an audio/video/networking signal-path diagram that shows how we’re setting up those signals in the McBean Theater at the Exploratorium.

I’m using the term “porting” since it speaks to the process of creating versions of a multimedia museum floor exhibit for online web and virtual world.  The Exploratorium has several examples of interactive exhibits that were designed for the real museum which have subsequently been translated into a form that works in our virtually real museum spaces including our website and in Second Life.  One of the latest additions to these virtual spaces is the exhibit, “Divided Attention.”  A perception exhibit that’s part of the Exploratorium’s Mind exhibition, it explores our ability to pay attention to several things at once.  In the exhibit, you follow a number of colored balls that move randomly and slowly change color to the same color as a set of colored balls that the balls are mixed in with. You can vary the number of balls you must keep track of. Exhibit developers designed a version of the exhibit for the exhibition website that I think faithfully reproduces the physical exhibit, sans the shared social interaction affordances of the museum floor.  This version works great as an individual experience and is fun to use.

SL resident and Exploratorium fan Patti Ceawlin, a builder and scripter focusing on physics exhibits, decided to adapt the Divided Attention exhibit for SL.  She got the essence of the exhibit concept and built a dynamic, interactive 3D version which can be seen on Exploratorium Island.  Visitors to the exhibit have commented that it’s a lot harder to keep track of a greater number of balls moving in 3D space as opposed to 2D space like the versions of the exhibit on the website and in the museum.  The SL exhibit allows the avatar to control her/his position in relation to the plane the balls are moving in by moving the avatar or a camera POV.  I’m not sure if or how this affects a visitor’s ability to keep track of the moving balls, but that presents an interesting twist and something we’ll have to observe.

Divided Attention Exhibit on Exploratorium Island