Touchscreen Applications for Museums and Galleries

DMC has a wealth of experience in producing touchscreen applications, ranging from multimedia careers’ guidance kiosks for a UK regional enterprise authority, to offshore safety training stations and museum and gallery displays.

A Joseph Beuys in Scotland touchscreen application (now also available on CD-ROM) was featured at the 1996 and 1997 Edinburgh International Festivals, telling the story of Beuys’ visits to Scotland through photographs, audio commentary, video and exhibition catalogue pages and a hypertext on the Celtic connections of the places featured.

A project to produce a touchscreen What’s On guide to the Demarco European Arts Foundation expanded to a full archive of over forty exhibitions, installations, stage plays, music and dance over a five week period. An easy-to-use multilingual interface allowed users to see and hear clips of performances, inspect artwork, read biographies of artists and record their own thoughts. A festival archive is often little more than cardboard boxes of slides, videos and programmes. This kept the excitement of performances alive long after the event was over.

The Web-based TAMH project at this site is really an experimental offshoot of a kiosk-based virtual museum. Bringing together the resources of smaller museums without the space to show much of the material, the unique navigation strategies allow visitors to become virtual curators, to see the things which interest them rather than the objects organised by a museum.