Transcript
Unknown Speaker 00:00
Hello, everybody. So I think we're gonna get started. It's already 1130. So we'll get started so we can have some good discussions. So the format of this panel is going to be 215 minute presentations. And then we'll do a discussion, a 30 minute discussion at the end, and it will be completely open. So Ryan will be doing the facilitation for the for the 30 minute discussion. So he will have the mic walking around, and so on, as he's basically posing questions, and so on. So. So first, what we're going to do is we're going to try to understand a little bit of who the audience is who you guys are. So we're gonna have a few questions for that. So just with a hands up just to, to answer. The first question is no, who has a mobile app right now for your organization? is about four
Unknown Speaker 00:47
There you go. Three, four, or five.
Unknown Speaker 00:49
So who has actually working on digital ad like a mobile strategy right now or has a mobile strategy in place?
Unknown Speaker 00:59
to I guess, it's worth mentioning that your mobile strategy doesn't need to be exclusive to app being the endpoint, just have a mindset and a philosophy around how your visitors before, during and after use your website or
Unknown Speaker 01:11
your app. So is that three, four? Okay, five, five, that's good. Okay, and who has actually internal resources to develop an app? So oh, one, two, okay. Okay. I didn't I didn't expect that much. Okay. So and who actually deployed an AR experience? Not necessarily mobile, but an AR experience and augmented reality experience? So two, three. Okay. And last question, who actually got into 3d scanning of artifacts? All right. Oh, wow. That's awesome. 123455. That's great. Okay, so we'll get started. So I'm gonna give the mic to Brandon. He's going to do his little 15 minute presentation, and then I'll do one after.
Unknown Speaker 02:07
All right, well, hello, everyone. Hope everybody's having an amazing time in San Diego. My name is Brendan CFO. I'm the founder and CEO of Q Zam. Let's get this show on the road and make sure that the presentation is actually pulling in, there we go.
Unknown Speaker 02:25
What we're going to talk about today is specifically, you know, how mobile apps and mobile engagement has evolved over the last 10 or some odd years. You know, right now, we're at a really interesting pivot point, as you've seen over the last, you know, day or so with the conversations about emerging technology, do we do an app? Do we not? What's the ROI? Are we living in a mobile browser based world? I know you guys are probably going to talk about progressive web apps, what do we make of this all, but one of the other elements that's playing an incredible role in that decision making process right now is the progress that's been made in the area of augmented reality. So for today, just to kind of paint a little bit of a picture about, you know, what my team has been working on. For the last several years. I mean, we basically wanted to build a platform that helped museums and cultural nonprofits engage their visitors on site quickly, easily and affordably. And so we've had the opportunity to work with several 100 organizations. But that's not what I'm going to talk about today, the the things that I'm going to talk about today are going to be specific to things that have differentiated, a traditional mobile app, you know, an audio guide, 2.0, with things that have a couple of extra utilities for the visitor, or not a utility at all, maybe something that created an completely new form of artistic creation at a contemporary art museum. So gonna take you down the road of AR, very high level, raise your hand, if you've experienced AR imagine many of us in this room have raised your hand, if you're thinking about AR what a strategy might look like at your institution. So it's very clear today that, you know, VR, maybe a couple years down the road, but AR has dramatically changed the way we think about content consumption. And you know, a world where, you know, there's no limits on the imagination for what you could create, because you can create just about anything in an ar, ar environment. So kind of the number one thing at the core of it all is, of course, it has to be or typically is going to be tied to some educational goals that the organization has in aligning with those goals and mission. So we've all probably seen examples, been around for quite some time about the simple notion of wow, wouldn't it be great if we could overlay hotspots on an image of painting in the in the gallery to allow those deeper layers of the work to come, you know, come to life or, you know, have something beyond the traditional object label. So you've seen those, you know, at the Cantor and Stanford, you've seen those maybe at Cleveland, a number of other organizations and that was kind of like the Phase One around the educational component, and then looking into, you know, the Art Gallery of Ontario and a bunch of other organizations, there's always this notion of AR kind of first on the scene very much around entertainment and gaming mechanics. How do we how do we engage? How do we kind of inject some of that energy into the work so very much the notion of edutainment? How do we bring the 17 century portrait to life in a way that makes it more relevant today? So, you know, see, see a lot of examples like that. But underlying it all, like, what are the problems that we're feeling today around things like guiding people through the venue through the labyrinth? What are those specific utilities, so also this opportunity to use these new tools to guide the visitor. And so throughout throughout the examples that I'll go over, we're going to talk about artistic creation, we're going to talk about our art, restitution of works that were lost and stolen. And we're going to talk about old art brought to life in a new dimension. And we're going to talk about that wayfinding utility. So to this first example, we had the great opportunity of working with the Perez art museum down in Miami, several years ago, on what became the first instance of AR kit in the museum context. And one of the first solely AR based museum exhibitions, there's no physical work whatsoever completely relying on this technology. And rather than look at AR can augment, or remix existing content, we kind of looked at how AR can be used as a completely new medium. So you can only imagine for a contemporary art museum that's commissioning artists to do new works, and of what that might look like. So a project was launched about three years ago, Pam a are an exhibition called invasive species with an artist who is looking at elements of climate change on the Miami landscape. And so she created these works that defied scale and economies meaning that this is a digital sculpture that would be nearly impossible for an emerging contemporary artists to create nor for any museum to fund and so to have these works is mez bug invading the space taking over the space and interacting was the the intent of the artists but also to create an iterative art form. So based on the user's interactions with the work over time, seeing how people reacted or lack thereof to different colors and textures, the artists work was evolving from day one to completion. And so this became a little bit of a press sensation for the museum, I distinctly remember my first MCN in Denver, Max Anderson standing up and saying, You come to me talking about tech and my ears turn off, you'd come to me talking about attendance and buzz on listening. So the very notion that for the museum, it brought together you know, a lot of energies across the various departments was one thing, camaraderie between the IT staff, the education staff, and the curators, that's hard to achieve. And this project did a good job in kind of fusing those interests. And it was written about pretty, you know, pretty internationally per its merits as a as an artwork for its merits in the, you know, Apple fan community but just as like a cultural piece that took on, you know, kind of a life of its own. It's been evolving from what started up Pam to the Deering estate and other cultural institution, they're going to be announcing a work at the Miami International Airport in the upcoming weeks. So something that started at the museum has taken on an exciting life of his own. But it would not have been possible without this team here on there. Two people from this group that are actually here at MCN. So you see anybody from Perez, talk to them about invasive species, it was a really, really exciting journey. Now kind of flipping the page to old culture historical culture, given a new completely new context. This is the artist Gustav Klimt, a native of Vienna, Austria, and on the 100 year anniversary of the death of some of the great Dinis modernists, Vienna and in Austria at large, we're honoring Gustaf Clint Otto Faulkner and Egon Sheila. And there's a major technology conference that's hosted in Vienna every year, called pioneers, and it takes place at the Imperial Palace, the Hofburg. And they wanted a way to infuse culture into that audience. And also the Museum of applied art in Vienna, wanted a way to engage this, you know, tech savvy, digital, you know, contingent that was coming to their city for a couple of years to talk about the future. And so there's this famous work called the tree of life
Unknown Speaker 09:34
that exists in their collection. And it's behind this glass vitrine and they wanted to find a way to give it some new dimension. So in collaboration with the Museum of Applied Arts, and the pioneers festival, we enable the visitors of tourists to Vienna and visitors and attendees of this conference to plant the tree of life throughout the various parks and gardens of the city. of Vienna. So taking something that you know two dimensional and bringing it to life, and I do I do want to say and you know, I know sometimes there's some opaqueness, sometimes there's limited transparency, this didn't cost a lot of money, I think it was for four figures. Um, it was not a, you know, five or six figure project is very, very straightforward and, you know, kind of a testament to anyone scanning in their collection. You know, once you have the scan, this obviously is created from scratch. But for your existing culture that exists in three dimension, you know, to get it into the AR environment is pretty straightforward. What I'm about to talk about next was a completely independent, experimental project by various members of my team. This woman up here is Isabella Stewart Gardner, a great pioneering art collector and kind of culture vulture from my city of Boston, she amassed a remarkable collection and built a kind of a Venetian Palazzo style estate in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston to house for collection. But unfortunately, about 30 years ago, two men dressed up like police officers on St. Patrick's Day broke into the museum and over the course of 81 minutes, still 13 works with an aggregate value of over $500 million dollars, they still don't know what the works are, the FBI is involved, it's kind of one of those you're waiting for, you know, you're waiting for Mark Wahlberg to make a movie or Ben Affleck to make a movie about this cold case. But it's something that we know, you know, it's kind of a, it's something that we know in Boston, but we don't know what the works look like. We don't know if there was a heist, meaning that when you listen to people, as they walk through there, all of these, you know, ambiguities. And so members of my team really inspired by the museum, having grown up in the area and gone, you know, had this idea when some of the new advances were taking place in AR around answering the question, could we put the stolen art back in the frames at the at the Gardner Museum? Is it technically possible? You know, what are the dynamics there? And does it look good? Is it stable? Like all those underlying technical questions? And so kind of Lo and behold, this is absolutely, you know, a simplistic skunkworks, three or four hours of developer time just experimenting in a new medium to see, is this possible? And, you know, are there people that are, you know, further driven to the works that didn't know what they look like, or didn't know what they felt like, or just the missing context, when you're looking at a JPG, you know, on a website, or in a printed book, it's a whole nother thing to return the culture to its rightful context or place. So again, completely experimental independent from the museum, just something a bunch of, you know, nerds in Boston were intrigued by, it kind of took on a life of its own in the eyes of the media, with coverage and wired advice and fastcompany. The art, you know, the art world responded a lot of articles in Russia and China, and much to our surprise, if anybody has any tips about where the works might be, I don't know, maybe correlation, I don't know. But it just really was intriguing to see what the reaction to such a simple experiment, you know, might look like. And I think, you know, more than anything, like the idea of just simple experiments might take on a life of their own. And in the process, you learn a lot. So some of the some of the discussions were more interesting than, you know, the even experience or the output, like all of these articles started to come out at the end of last year, you know, as the restitution debate rages on in Europe, does the solution lie in the art of the high tech copy? And below that headline was the screenshot from hacking the heist, Isabella Stewart Gardner, you know, overlaid AR project. And then in another article about the same topic, should we relinquish our insistence on privilege of owning original works in favor of technology? technological wizardry, I think one was art net, and the other one was the art newspaper. So this idea of these questions about provenance and rightful place of these artifacts, does AR and VR play a role? And I think the simple answer is yes, it does. And then right after the tragic destruction of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, a PhD student wrote a piece about hacking the highest hacking the inferno, what do you do when your art is lost in a fire pointing to that project? So we're just kind of like completely blown away and surprised that this took on a life of its own. And then folks from this community like Loic Tallon, the former chief digital officer said, if someone's making an AR experience out of the collection, I see that as pure mission fulfillment, so what does it mean when your team creates an AR experience or a third party creates any AR experience or people are catching Pokeyman at your organization, you know, those are all three very different things, but if it's involving your collection or your story, that's you know, surely a positive and just a sight you know, in quote Max Sanderson again, like, you know, Boon, a boon for institution. So these things can really kind of catapult forward especially as the consumer, you know, experience evolves and the expectation for experience evolves. So when this article came out, and probably a lot of you in this room read it, The New Yorker did a piece rather on Maalik, one of the founding fathers of the internet blog. And a prominent venture capitalists wrote a piece in The New Yorker that every single friend family relative was foreign forwarding me because kind of deep down into the article about Pokeyman go, he talks about going to the newly renovated SF MOMA. And he said, I wanted to know everything about the art. And I felt as if I should be able to lift up my phone and get more details rather than having to type a search term in my browser. So very simplistic, basic idea of something someone wanted to achieve. And so the thing that really stood out for me was when he when he wrote Pokemon Go had changed my expectations and how to access information. It's not about Pokemon Go, it's not about catching Pokemon is the shift in expectation. And so I think what we're always up against, you know, regardless of how we feel, people should access content, or what type of medium they should be using, or what to use, or what not to use, is that kind of doesn't matter. Because we're not our target audience. It's what the what the consumer expectation is. So when I can order a car in, you know, a tap of my phone, or order a pizza tap of my phone, or whatever, transfer funds through Venmo, like that, that to the consumer is frictionless. And so when they experience these things, they want to see that in the world around them. And so I thought Amalek did a really interesting job of applying that. And so it really, you know, obviously, with the work that we do with museums, and kind of looking at notions of accessibility and ease of use, we wanted to see, can we easily identify every single work in a gallery using, you know, the new treasures of machine vision? Is it good enough? Is it spatially competent enough to overlay this information, and kind of remove layers of fiction? So, you know, a lot of these things, you know, our general experiments, were intrigued by what some of these tools are capable of doing. But beyond that, we wanted to kind of gut check and see, are any of these things actually useful? We think they're cool, but we're too close. What do people think about it. And so we ran a survey at a major institution in the Northeast with over 120 subjects. And it was overwhelmingly positive, when you handed someone a device with no interface, all it said was hold me up to a painting. And I'll tell you more, just that, that sheer simplicity. And I only have a couple more minutes here, but some concepts that I want to leave you with as thinking about kind of where things are going where the you guys are gonna kill me, but skating to where the puck is going to my great Canadians to my left. So kind of like, pretty much the whole game. So you know, there's
Unknown Speaker 17:47
so there's this kind of this concept, people saying that we're going from, you know, we're going from web platform, number one, social media platform number two, platform. Number three, being this concept of mirror world, where the physical world and the digital world are being kind of the lines between them are blurred. And the reality is that Google and Apple and tech companies are creating a virtual digital carbon copy of the physical world, museums do have a great opportunity to play, you know, in that sandbox in a really positive way. And it has great implications beyond you know, connecting the two but also in the area of Wayfinding, which is just a huge, huge challenge over the last you know, five years I've been here I've heard talks on blue dot, you are a blue dot, you're not blue dot beacons, don't use them use them. They're great everything in between. And the reality is that Wayfinding is so difficult, and the infrastructure needed to, you know, achieve any level of accuracy is really painful. So we're doing some experimentation around this idea of the converging the two views. It's not about Blue Dot, it's not about kind of zooming out to where I am over a floor plan with limited, limited context around I just put the slide up here, because when you put a Harvard Business Review slide, people think you're wicked smart, and I'm from Boston. So that's, that's really the reason no, it's a great, great article on the on the Harvard Business Review, I think it was like CO written by someone from PTC, which is one of the leaders in AR and VR and CAD software just around that idea of the convergent view as taking away the mental effort. And I know even like as like two taps as being, Hey, that's not a lot of mental effort, or three taps, but really just no effort whatsoever. So that idea, and so put together, you know, some ideas about the matter. And kind of what it came to the head was that AR is going to kill, you know, the blue dot, it's going to kill the blue.as. We have these convergent views. So one of the utilities that we've been doing a lot of work in is like the simple notion of, hey, if I know what the work I'm speaking from the behalf of a phone, hey, if I know what the work looks like, I can probably put down this line that gives someone a path from point A to point B, and then it can congratulate them with some really exciting content when they get there and it might be available in the language that they speak they might be able To change the size might be available in a way where someone who has low or no vision has the ability to get audible directions from point A to point B. So these are just some of the concepts that we've been working deeply in over the last couple of years. And for me, it all kind of wraps up. And if we think of the world as a book, then AR has this opportunity of being this digital magnifying glass. So really pulling back the onion, letting people you know, touch any specific layer they want to and experience the content with as limited number of obstacles as possible. So that's my schpeel. Thank you very much. And I look forward to hearing my hockey playing friends. To my left, I talk about where the puck is going skating to where the puck is in the goal in the goal, but the biscuit in the basket, as they say,
Unknown Speaker 20:46
I'm just gonna grab your stat here, grab this
Unknown Speaker 21:03
All right, so my talk is going to be about what we do at the Museum of History and Korean War Museum, and what we've started looking at in terms of strategy for mobile, and where to go next. So we're looking at a Mobile Museum guide as a framework at this point. So just to give a bit of context of who we are. So we're basically in Ottawa, and so to provinces gets to know and Ontario, so two museums, one on on just on the underside of the of the gets, you know, part and then the other one, so it's a 20 minute walk between the two. So it's two buildings. So one building, decaying Museum of History, we have about a million square foot, 3 million artifacts, 1.3 million visitors a year for the History Museum, the war museum, we have 4000 square foot 500,000 artifacts, and 500,000 visitors a year as well. So having two physical buildings, having a museum Guide is a challenge, you know, try to maintain. And so what we looked at is we started looking at the entire visitor journey of our visitors, and started looking at what the pain points of course are, and how a mobile guide can actually help through the visitor journey and enhance that experience overall. So that was the root of some of our digital strategies. So what we did is we started looking at drafting, so it's in progress, draft, our full Strategy for Mobile, with these principles. So inclusive of force, engaging, playful, flexible, simple and sustainable. Okay. And of course, looking at the whole pan of different solutions that are out there. Open source solutions, and other solutions are available through vendors and third parties. What we started looking at is actually developing a new new platform is what we decided on going on open source platform. And of course, looking at the different main features that most museums do. And by developing this platform, we're making it of course, completely modular and available for both of our museum as well, because it has to be all filmed and directed, right. So of course, we're looking at the different main focus features, profiles. I'll talk a little bit about that. What's happening at the museum today. So as they're landing on the museum, downloading the app, opening the app, you know, what, what's going on what's happening? And then of course, the exploring, which is a big beasts on its own, how do you explore the museum, and then just that Wayfinding, like how to direct myself around the museum. So those are the main four features that we selected to try to deep down. And we're talking about foundations here. So we're talking about developing some foundation features, so that we can build upon that afterwards, and so on. So these are the four foundations that we went in, we're actually talking a little bit more in terms of this is a new, we haven't seen much of this yet. So we're looking at developing a fully customized experience for the visitor. And we're lucky to look at different languages. So of course, being in Canada, we have two official languages, but also we're actually opening up so our current app we have now as our temporary is in seven languages for the Tourism Tourism market, right. So the language so you select your language, your select your age group, and we'll talk about that as well. And what that relates to and whether that affects the audience grew. So are you an explorer? Are you educator, so it actually will fluctuate the type of experience that you're getting your interests? Are you really you're interested in, for example, art in for Canadian history. So it focuses a bit of, of the content that will be displayed, displayed and your membership status. So there's some added value of what's happening. So as you're exploring with the mobile guide, it provides you those benefits and Of course, special needs and accessibility. Alright, so transforming the mobile guide into an audio guide for the experience is is, you know, for visually impaired and other type of special needs as well, even autism and some other type of special needs to craft that experience that you're you're going through the museum. Of course, the notification and privacy and so on settings are there as well. So if we go more into Pro to,
Unknown Speaker 25:31
to the customization, so if once a visitor actually customized their needs, then it's their home, the main page of what's going on is completely crafted based on those settings. If I selected for example, the age group, if I'm actually in the more child under 12, or even under eight, it becomes more of a did you know, or a scavenger hunt, but it's the same content that's crafted based on the age group, and so on, so on. So now you're talking about the exploratory content, and it's fully customized to your needs. You even have different ways to explore, based on you know, not your languages, your your interest group, and so on, and what's tailored in terms of what's happening to private or public programming and so on displays there, for your needs. So as we're getting into explorer, it goes even more into customization. So as a child, for example, like I was saying, you're looking at exploring the galleries, and in more of a playful kind of way, or a very Did you know, kind of small tidbits of content. And if it's based on interest as well. So you're, you're really you can tell that you can craft these experiences based on what you want. And one of the important ones, of course, is based on your, your time that you have allowed as well. So someone going to museum we have about you, you'd have to sleep there for a week to actually go through all the content we have in our galleries. So it's impossible, right? So you only have your family of four, you only have about an hour, okay, so this tool will actually give you the tool of getting to the things that you need to see in that hour based on what your goals are of what you're getting. So it's a bit of goal setting with your profile. So that was one of our base foundation that we want to start building up for this customization of this, these tours. And, of course, the actual tours. So as you're getting into the galleries, there are some added value. And we'll go a little bit through that an infrastructure is necessary to be able to provide a really good interactive tour. So of course, we're looking at some triggers. So we're looking at three different types of triggers, all three of them would be deployed, you've got those plates. So this is a point of interest. So you can actually put in a code saying, Okay, there's something here on the on our mobile guide, that is of interest, so not add value or so on, put the code in and you'll get the content that you need the additional content, of course, it has all the Braille and so on. The NFC tag is actually right underneath the the label. So you can actually just tap your phone instead of putting the code. So if for mobile devices that have that enabled, so you can just tap the phone, they'll just give you that additional content. The beacon is there as well. There's a feature of saying, Well, what's near me, I'm just browsing. So what's near me. So you're clicking on the on the near me, and it shows you some of the interesting that added value content that's in around you. So that infrastructure is important, just to kind of build up the foundation of all the possibilities that we could do. That you you saw that Brandon was speaking about as well. So that's that's the infrastructure part in the
Unknown Speaker 28:47
so of course, as as you explore some of the foundation, and these are all different modules that we were developing, so they can be added on or added off. Depending on the museums that we we manage. So of course the D augmented reality objects. So having to scan and this is a basic foundation for augmented reality where you can have artifacts that are 3d scanned, and they're behind the glass, so you're not able to actually touch it. So you can just pop it up on the screen, rotated look underneath it, and also access some hot points, content to be able. So this is just a foundation augmented reality feature for the app that we're looking at. And this is something that could be integrated and just grown through the the exhibition. And I was asking the question about 3d scanning. The technology is here today the the 3d scanning that we've been demoing, the the actual hardware hasn't moved hasn't really evolved too too much. But it's the software that has evolved 500 times for the last few years. It would take to do for example the skull that's there even in full color. So that little blue scanner for you familiar anyone of you familiar with these two scanner There's no. So this is a I'm not doing a sales pitch or anything. But it's the demo, that's the scanners that we actually selected. As we did our research, the little blue scanner is actually a scanner will do high definition full color. And within 15 minutes, you're able to have a 3d scan of your object. With the software that's attached, a student can actually, with the proper quick training could actually get this done. So this is an affordable way to get 3d scans within 15 minutes or so. And it's quite quite interesting. The little gray one is is a for larger objects. So it's a little less detailed, but it's for larger objects, like canoes and things like that. And what what they've done in the demo, what they've done is you use the combination of both, so you can do the large canoe, and then you go back into with a small one for little details and so on. And then the software will actually very easily within 30 minutes or so you can actually get a full well designed 3d canoe. So for augmented reality, those are the foundations that we're setting up right now in our strategy, we're getting those that in place for us to start getting that augmented reality approached through galleries as you're walking around. And for the visitor at home, we, our strategy is to provide these 360 virtual tours. So again, you know, it's the little 360s of different galleries or highlights of galleries throughout the throughout the museum's. And then in there, you have little hot points and things, of course of just the deep dive of certain certain elements. But again, it's from home, right, so Google Cardboard affordable, you just put it on there, and you can explore it, our current app actually has just 360s with no little hot points. But you get a really good immersive experience of knowing what's going on. Well, how the museum experience would feel when you're there. So those are the foundation for for for exploring. And then you got a bit of the wayfinding necessary here, I'm here and so on. So it's the the traditional map wayfinding with the blue.as, Brandon was saying so there is a blue.of saying where you are interactive, as well of saying where the interesting points are, and so on based on your settings and your your profile that you've set. So it's it's something that we're putting on foundation.
Unknown Speaker 32:23
Now, what we've decided in terms of the strategy for the technology is designing it for sustainable and for the future as well. So we're looking at the future of mobile is progressive web app. And that means that you actually, as you do the development of the app, it means you actually don't need to have it on the on the stores, the Apple Store and Google Play, and so on. It can actually be a link from your website as you're navigating your responsive mobile website. And then you could just add it to your home as a shortcut. And it's a web app. But it will it caches it. So a lot of the information and data and so on is stored on your phone. And it's a lot more friendlier. The challenge right now is that not all native features are accessible with a progressive web app. Alright, so we're not there yet. But the way that we're going to structure, the native app, which is the one that you get off the stores, and so on, with this technology, most of this technology is actually going to be ready for the Progressive Web App. So the modules that are not necessarily ready in terms of a progressive web app, it will will be ready, we can swap it out once it's ready, as well as developing. But we know that that's from from, from discussions and so on, we know that that's where it's going. So we're the technology is quite flexible in developing that. The other part in terms of the technology that we want to do is that it's not reliant on a specific CMS, a content management system. We're developing our content management system with WordPress. So you can actually put in all your explore content and so on all your settings through WordPress. And then what it does is that it relies on a data file called JSON. And the JSON is what will actually pull in the use of the JSON file doesn't ever touch the CMS. So you can have Drupal, you can have any type of CMS that could spill out basically the JSON structure that you need for the app itself. So that's the structure that we're doing it. So it's not reliant on that CMS, and it's available for other other organizations if they want to. So we're actually excited to to actually open it up. There will be a museum guide.org open source project that we're going to facilitate. And we're looking for museums. So right now we're looking at some of the national other national museums in Canada to to jump on this to help us through the development of this framework that we're doing and the growth of it. And that was me. That was it.
Unknown Speaker 35:00
Awesome. Is this thing on? It is? All right. So I think there was a lot to digest and talk about and both of your talks, we have a bit of questions that we have sort of just in, in working through both of our presentations, we, you know, a lot of a lot of questions came up, and we had some, some good discussion back and forth, while we're planning things, and one of the things was the concept of minimum, minimal viable content and storytelling. And I think a lot of the stuff that we talked about, you know, it takes a lot of content, it's content heavy, and it's not takes time to develop. And, you know, you always have the discussion with your Cordero colleagues about, you know, how much more work is this gonna, just gonna be for me? And so I think what we were talking about is, it doesn't always need to be that that content already exists somewhere. So we really, were talking about what can be repackaged? What do we already have existing that can be repackaged? So I'm wondering, for those of you that are working through your strategies, are you having these discussions with your colleagues already, and I'm going to walk around with a mic. So if anyone wants to just give us a little, you know, sort of window into where you're at with with your mobile? That would be great.
Unknown Speaker 36:23
But also, I think we can just open up to questions as well, we I don't think we need to be stuck on these as well, I
Unknown Speaker 36:28
think. Right? Do you want me to put them all up? Sure. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. So the other thing we talked about is sort of who owns the digital layer? You know, there's a lot of copyright issues involved with with content in our all of our museums, you know, is it? Is it something that the digital teams own and work with internal stakeholders to ensure that the content has proper rights and things like that? Interoperability came up as well, you know, how do we plan for five years out for mobile? Are we looking ahead to the next generation? Is everyone looking at Progressive Web Apps?
Unknown Speaker 37:05
Yeah, even even on that point, one of the things that changes the landscape, and kind of points to the importance of that is like, just a couple of weeks ago, some people downloading a new version of iOS saw that there was some sort of library available that pointed to Apples movement forward into the smart glasses. And so thinking that that is going to be one of the next, you know, interfaces that play, how do you start? Like, you guys, it sounds like you're on a very long term project, you're building for sustainability. So those types of questions need to be a part of the conversation. How do we keep it evergreen? How do we keep it growing?
Unknown Speaker 37:41
Yeah, yeah, we, you know, it is a 12 month project overall, but we are looking at, again, that minimal package. So the product that we're launching, we're launching it slowly, it will not have all the features that I spoke of. But slowly, every three months or so, we're looking at adding, you know, those features, and so on. So, and again, still thinking about the technology in the future. We're actually fortunate being one of the large national museums, our team, we have full developers on board. So that's one of the last question, for example, we do have the internal capacity, we've actually worked with queue zoom, in the early days of queue, zoom on their pallet. And so we played around with a whole bunch of different solutions, and so on as well. So we're fortunate we had that. And I think we want to give back by this museum guide dot.org, the work that we're doing as well. And it makes it another choice, of course of taking a look at
Unknown Speaker 38:42
awesome. Does anyone have Yes? Yeah, we have to use the mic, because we're recording the sessions. And we're gonna put them we're going to podcasts and after so
Unknown Speaker 38:55
thanks, and thanks for coming. Great presentation. I'm Mark. I'm from the low art museum, University of Miami. I'm also an MCN. Board Member. I just wanted to address the first question, briefly is that I think that I get it for we have limited resources, but I think it's dangerous. The idea of just to repackage what already already exists. So the museum field is really going through this issue of diversity, equity and inclusion. And so the existing voices and research primarily are not always representative of the diverse communities that we're serving. So, you know, repackaging this existing information, the minimal non inclusive voices that we have, can be problematic, so I'm just throwing that out there.
Unknown Speaker 39:47
Yeah, I mean, I can I completely agree and kind of in thinking through some of the topics for discussion, the notion of minimum viable content wasn't exclusively tied to a repackaging notion is more About kind of, you know, we talk about these concepts of being agile and having a minimum viable product, kind of what's the least number of features, or tours or whatever it might be, that can be put out into the open to get a fixed, you know, tighter and smaller feedback loop to know that we're heading in the right direction with the right inputs. I think, you know, even on the topic of minimum viable content, I want to loop it back to the question you asked yesterday, about the machine translation in my mind, like those two, you know, ideas can be pulled together? And like, what is the least amount of translating effort, whether it be machine or otherwise, that we can put forward to know that our speaker, non native English speakers have the ability to access content? So just an idea of like, what are the I don't want to call them shortcuts? Because I think that's a dangerous term to use, but what are like, how can I get 90% of the benefit for 10% of the effort, um, you know, by just being, you know, thoughtful in advanced about what I can put out quickly.
Unknown Speaker 41:10
So, Glenn burns from from Ansel, so we're a mobile app vendor. Like, Brandon, so I'm interested, like, you know, you've gone made this decision to build yourself, we know how much it costs to build a platform over the long term, it's going to be hundreds of 1000s millions of dollars. Is that a good use of the taxpayers money? And how do we make the decision not to work with a vendor to to, to build on their kind of platforms for a far more affordable price? So
Unknown Speaker 41:42
that was the question I was waiting for? Yeah. Yeah. So I come from actually a digital agency background, I've had 20 years of running a digital agency for museums and public sector organizations on and the team that we have, and vendors will will be using vendors, definitely in terms of the development of scope as we're moving forward, digital agency vendors, not necessarily a product vendor. But the crafting of what we're trying to develop. It is competitive in competing with with the vendors that like to use it like you guys, in terms of developing this platform, we, it won't cost the hundreds of millions of dollars. In doing this. We've, we've got a really good skilled team internally, we develop our own Wayfinding, info kiosk, for example, and platforms and websites, and so on, so on. So we know that the whole cycle of product development. So it is something that we've played around for the last couple of years, for not only for mobile, but for other applications. So the stack, the technology stacks that we're using and stuff is quite comfortable. The technology to develop applications. Today, using JavaScript libraries, and so on is a lot easier and a lot faster, right, and the whole stack that we've selected. So it was an approach for us. Again, it's we love vendors, we love products. We use products, of course, for special cases. But this is a milestone product, it's one of those main it's like a website, where it's a main tool for our visitors. So we call it one of our main touch points for the visitor. So we feel that it's more confident to use it as an ongoing operational tool, and not to have and to have the internal capacity to maintain it. And that's just and again, it's probably one of, you know, out of 100 organizations that we can do this. We don't We definitely do not recommend this for most organizations. But this is the approach that we're taking. And that's that's what I'm saying.
Unknown Speaker 44:03
Yeah, I think it's definitely valuable. To use taxpayer money for this type of project. I think one of the things that's important and I think we need to understand is that digital layer is there. And it needs to be an essential service just like visitor services, just like the website is an essential service. People everybody has a phone in their pocket these days or, you know, a large majority. So, you know, producing something to gauge with those those visitors I think is really important. Tell me, I'm wrong.
Unknown Speaker 44:38
You're wrong. Hi, I'm Linda. I'm from Sydney and I used to work I was head of digital at the Australian Museum for a long time and digital learning at the Maritime Museum. Yeah, I've done a lot of work on talking to visitors about mobile apps, digital blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we're just saying to Ryan on Twitter. that a lot of people I spoke to it's a, it's a hard conversation because a lot of them don't want to use their devices when they're at a museum. And I interviewed one couple and mom and dad and they had they almost got divorced over this because it was the mother was like, Well, I want to have a screen free experience when I'm at a museum. So I think it's a really tough one. And also think often people say, well, visitors don't know what they want. But there's a lot of practical things that they say, and I call them the worried visitor, it's like, you know, like, how do I download it? Is there Wi Fi there? Am I just going to have this thing on my device. And we know from research in Australia that Australians keep mobile apps on their devices for two weeks, and then they just don't look at them again. And also for us at the Maritime Museum, the big issue was my device fall in the water? And that was a huge concern for them, because a lot of mobile phones do, because we're right on Sydney Harbour. So yeah, anyway. So I think it's, um, I think it's a really interesting product. And I do think that there are a layer of visitors that really want to engage with that. But also, when I've done work, excuse me on Wayfinding, a lot of people say, I'm just happy to wander around. Museum is, so I just think you've got to kind of sell it to the people that will use it. And
Unknown Speaker 46:17
I think at the end of the day, it's simply about options, not everyone's going to use any single thing in the same way, not everyone's going to even want to use a printed guide, or look at a map. So, you know, some organizations have as few as like three visitor personas, some have as many as 20, somewhere in between, you know, it's kind of finding where you're going to hit some of your goals and accommodate the needs as as many as you can. So it is a complex, you know, it's absolutely a complex problem, like you point out,
Unknown Speaker 46:45
see. That's right. So what what our framework, what we, what you see is that the personalization, for example of your planning your visit, those functionalities are actually what we're using for the website, and our on Site Info kiosk. So that engineering that's being done there is also just going to be adapted for the mobile. So one of the major strategy is really to try to enhance the visitor experience, once they're there, how easy they can actually get to what they want to explore and have a wow factor, the, and again, the Progressive Web App. And the technology is very important. Because, again, yes, do not want to install a mobile app for the museum for that one day, and then delete it. And the idea is that you can browse the mobile website, and then most of the same functionality will be there. And then for the enhanced exploratory type of little bonuses, they can just with one button on while they're browsing the website, because they're on the website to fry or trying to figure out what's going on, you can just add it to the homepage and have that augmented experience. So we hear you, it's part of our research as well. And it's just getting that the goal of what we're trying to do. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 48:09
Anybody else?
Unknown Speaker 48:11
Hi, I'm Joey from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And I'm very interested and intrigued and refreshed by the progressive web application, particularly because I am in digital collections. So I'm thinking about the long term retention of things like this. And I understand that you're, you know, it's still working towards having all of the features of the native applications. But I'm curious if this community is also thinking about creating tools for migrating native applications to the Progressive Web Applications. And you know, what possibility there is for kind of being able to retain the data apps that are out there?
Unknown Speaker 48:49
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in most most cases, regardless of what the CMS says, there's some sort of standardized data output feeding content into the app. So you know, by way of a JSON feed or API, just like you guys have, just like we have, so the ability to have that existing data, you know, data source in the back, whatever the back end is feed a progressive web app is a piece of cake. Yeah. It's really a big technical challenge.
Unknown Speaker 49:15
That's right. So exporting, for example, the data of of a native app into the JSON file format, right? That that requires for these this tool, for example, is that easy. That's what
Unknown Speaker 49:31
we've literally just, we've had an acquisition a couple of months ago when migrating everyone from to a betting platform to our mitres platform. And we've just written the script that we're going to take all of that data and migrate it and get 95% of the way there, that 5% manual cleanup that we had to do where we could match stuff but the programming
Unknown Speaker 49:53
Laura has a question.
Unknown Speaker 49:57
Hi, I'm Laura. Man I work with frankly grin and Webb, we're a research and strategy firm. And like Linda, I've done a lot of research into mobile use in museums as well. And I'm especially interested in the personalization features that you described. And two of them in particular, the the audience group information and the interest categories. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about those? Who are the audience groups? And how did you come up with them? What are the interest categories? And do you have any data on how those are used?
Unknown Speaker 50:32
So the in progress in the strategy that was there? But I can talk to what we like to Falk use a visitor experience model. So it is an internal debate. We're we established a working group within our museum quite recently, last couple of months, to start looking at the overall strategy and approaches and to define what you just spoke about.
Unknown Speaker 51:00
Yeah, so part of our internal structure, Marquis launched a digital steering committee that includes people at the director level his colleagues. And then from that there are various digital working groups. One of them is the digital touchpoints working group. We've had three meetings. And we do have, you saw an old visitor journey map. We do have personas from a few years ago and that journey map, but that's going to be one of the first things that we're going to do in that group is update that information.
Unknown Speaker 51:33
I'd be curious to have access to your research to we'll talk. Exactly.
Unknown Speaker 51:40
Hi, my name is Mila. I just have a question actually picking up on what Laura said over there is do you guys actually, what are you doing when people are entering answering those questions? Are you going to be using that data in any way to inform your decision making? And or what are their privacy considerations? I guess it's an opt in but
Unknown Speaker 52:02
you mean answering questions? Sorry. Like when they're when they're entering their profile? privacy information?
Unknown Speaker 52:09
Well, privacy. I mean, I guess it's sort of opt in. So maybe it's less less hairy. But mostly, I'm just wondering about how you might use the data that you're collecting about your visitors?
Unknown Speaker 52:20
Yeah. So definitely. Being Canada, we have very strict privacy policies, we do privacy impact assessments for every product that we launch. So that information at this point from the strategy is we don't retain it, it's just stored locally. It is there is nothing that is retained at this point.
Unknown Speaker 52:41
So as the experience kind of like, although it's retained locally, rather than into a profile on the cloud, like it's similar to the Spotify onboarding, select a couple preferences, and then Bada bing, bada boom,
Unknown Speaker 52:52
yeah. And it's just to create the filter. And that's it. So there's no, there's nothing retained. Yeah. That's the current situation. What do you guys interested in? Moving towards actually making use of that? Data? Agreed. But there's a lot of work and justification for doing that. So there's, there's but yes, I mean, if it's something it's, you know, you've got the list of priorities of certain things to launch a product like this. So what we did is we we again, risk mitigated and saying, No, we're not doing that right now. So for the purpose of launching the product. So but Yes, baby steps. That's it.
Unknown Speaker 53:35
Yeah. Nothing's ever done. Right. Nothing's ever done.
Unknown Speaker 53:39
So I've a question for the audience. So those of you who have invested effort in 3d scanning was ever a part of that around your mobile strategy moving forward, specific to augmented reality and remote access and some of the things that you pointed out of being able to gesture, the object? Or is it solely are available on the whispered collections data?
Unknown Speaker 54:06
Oh, five minutes. So
Unknown Speaker 54:07
yeah, hi. Sure. So I'm with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. And we did a project years ago called virtual Williamsburg. And we're sort of operating on a different scale, when rather than skulls and canoes, we're talking about scanning buildings and an entire town. And so we did that work presentation years ago. Yeah. And then unfortunately, inevitably, things aren't necessarily I think maybe a better word for repackager bubble is reusable. So we've started starting some of those things over again, we're using more advanced technologies such as Lidar and things like that. So yeah, so it's, it was it was originally intended for a different purpose. But now as we as we think about it, and and you know, one of the sort of constant themes here is we just got our feet in the game years ago, and now we know a little bit more about it, and we have some experience with What went well, and what didn't, we're able to repeat that now for a different platform such as they are. And that's kind of what we're looking at going forward.
Unknown Speaker 55:11
Thank you. Yeah, I was just gonna share, we scan the series of objects in our antiquities collection. And we're sort of debating how we wanted to make that accessible, we actually have decided for now to pilot and in gallery digital interactive, we need to get a larger screen that decision was made to, we feel like to make the gallery a bit more dynamic. But we're also thinking about social interaction of how people would interact with a digital interactive as opposed to being on their own mobile device. In all likelihood, you'd be able to access this from an online platform as well. But right now, we're leaning towards enhancing the in gallery experience with our 3d scans.
Unknown Speaker 56:07
I just wanted to mention about the secondary uses of personally identifiable information, we have to be careful how we leverage information that we collect. For secondary purposes, you want to ensure you obtain consent, because it get from a policy perspective, not just a legal perspective, you can upset your visitors, when they learn that you've collected information for one purpose. And then you now use that information in another way without having informed them at the time you collected that data.
Unknown Speaker 56:39
Thank you. Last, maybe this is the last question.
Unknown Speaker 56:47
So when one of the technical underpinnings for a lot of the advanced features that you're doing in these apps, is either location awareness or indoor positioning? Can you guys talk about what what kind of approaches you're taking to that? That problem?
Unknown Speaker 57:02
So definitely, we're testing out right now we have a full, like an Aruba. I'm not sure if anybody saw that in the Aruba infrastructure that works well with, so positioning with their beacon as well. So there's a mix of technology, we're still in the testing phase of seeing what the infrastructure would be properly to do the positioning. But that's it would be more of a mix of that Wi Fi and, and beacon.
Unknown Speaker 57:28
Yet, I've seen a tremendous amount of progress with regards to on device machine vision to produce some of the wayfinding kind of benefits, like I displayed towards the end of the presentation. I mean, it's been it's one of those super slippery slopes, indoor positioning, I know, it's been regarded as one of the holy grails. And just, you know, over the years that I've been involved in the museum sector, like the amount of attention placed on it, because it is a truly big problem that needs to be solved. But the amount of money that's been thrown out infrastructure to solve it to only get you like, half the way there has been baffling. So to be able to get like, almost like centimeter accurate indoor positioning, which is coming is going to be one part, you know, near term sensor fusion kind of mixing what you know, from some of the, you know, access points or beacons, and what you know, from the device kind of all together. But the thing that I showed, and I didn't really go too much into detail was that little AR overview of indoor navigation did not rely on Wi Fi did not rely on beacons did not rely on GPS, it was solely based on the phone's ability to know what it was looking at the location of that, and then the relative locations of the kind of pivot points in the journey. So I think in the future, that's going to be the way things go because there again, is going to be this kind of digital carbon copy indoor outdoor that you're able to kind of program within or work within versus needing to go, Oh, my God, we need to install this thing in our access point. Oh my god, there's a new one that installs in our track lighting, do we do that, like you're hearing all of these things right now because those are new, kind of shifts in you know, all of those sensors, whether it be Bluetooth or Zigbee, or ultra wideband, all of these different frequencies. It's all very, you know, there's a lot of noise, like there's a lot of noise and all that, but I do think there's a lot heading in the direction of it being vision based versus radiofrequency based. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.