Nordic digital excellence

NODEM was a really good conference in Iceland, mix of indoor and outdoor experiences which included several museums, good presentations, technologies and people. Find a PDF of my keynote here. Find my pictures here.

Reception at National Museum: some nice exhibits including this outline of viking boat created in the floor, with lights, shown here.

Great 'disruptive' project presented by Amalia Kallergi in which she lured visitors into recording audio commentary about an exhibit, only to play it back to other visitors.

A couple notable 'virtual' projects. In one, the Workers Museum in Copenhagen has created a high-quality re-creation of the old Carlsberg brewery, which you can explore as a virtual character and even encounter some other workers. Highlight of the presentation was when Jacob Østergaard made the virtual character into a giant, in order to get a birds-eye view.

Torfi Frans Ólafsson, in another keynote, showed the amazing MMPORG Eve Online which employs real architects to design spaces, lets users design their own 'dialogue trees,' has excellent rendering and AI. Some lessons for the real world, I think.

Joachim Sauter of Art+Com said in his own keynote that he prefers the real world, and said the next frontiers interactivity is physical interfaces and non-screen-based displays. He showed a great example of this - moving ball display for BMW museum, really fluid and mesmerizing.

A nice blending of real and virtual worlds was awarded the exhibition prize. The Mediated Window is a pair of vertical screens made to look like a window, and that it is - a window to another place, in real time. One window in the Antiquities museum in Stockholm, another at an archaeological site, facilitated communication between the 2 places, between experts and amateurs.

Some other nice technologies in the exhibition, including 2 different takes on audio guides. Online Audio Guide is just that - nice simple web interface for museums, iPods for the visitors, whether their own or loaned. A nice touchscreen app automatically fills them up. Really simple and clear, filled up my iPod Touch for the Reykjavik 871±2 exhibition (see below). Another good Icelandic company!

The Pickup audio guide from Dataton takes another angle, with a purpose-built device that's nicely designed and dead simple: just a little stick with one button, you point it at an IR reader and it plays a track. Tiny lights embedded in the button show track progress, and a twist of the top of the thing adjusts volume. Plugging the stick into the charger automatically updates the tracks on it also. This is a nice solution for visitors who can't be bothered with iPods. Perhaps best of all it's got a small speaker built in, making for a more social audio guide.

Another simple idea from Evoking Spaces, spinoff company from Stockholm's Interactive Institute: a 'peepbox' with painting on one side, hole in the middle; you look through the hole and the painting comes to life inside (on screen).

A visit to (controversial) Hellishedi geothermal plant revealed some nice media created by local company Gagarin, including earthquake simulator and this long table/bench. Gagarin head Guðný Káradóttir also led a workshop on my favourite subject, 'Working with limited resources'.

Gagarin also did some nice media pieces for the permanent exhibition Reykjavik 871±2 at the city museum, in collaboration with Art+Com. Was particularly impressed with this front-projection interactive table which uses heat for touch sensing, not video tracking.

Another nice interactive table by Art+Com at Culture House, in the exhibition on Surtsey, a small volcanic island off the coast. This table with 2 projections, a nice slider/dial mechanism, and beautifully realistic spinning 3D model of the island that showed how it changed over time to good effect.

At Thingvellir we saw plate tectonics up close, at this conjunction of two plates in the middle of the Atlantic. Thanks Einar for the tour!