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Infrared

Page history last edited by Nancy Proctor 15 years, 7 months ago
Infrared Tags or Triggers 

 

Infrared triggering has been used for some years in museum audio tours, usually by installing the infrared trigger in ceilings or over doors to trigger content to play as visitors pass by. This sort of trigger was also used for the 2001 eDocent experiment at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York in 2001, the multimedia tour of the That’s Canada exhibition at La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in 2004, and the 2003 tour at the Marble Museum in Carrara, Italy. A similar installation was used in the location-sensitive Telecity exhibition tour installation at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 2003. 

  

Infrared (IR) is a line-of-sight technology, requiring a clear path between the trigger and the handheld device’s infrared receiver. Proximity to natural light can degrade the quality and hence reliability of the infrared beam, but more recent generations of IR technology have proven quite robust, and can even operate out-of-doors if the user can get fairly close to the trigger.

  

Infrared can be used to trigger content that is either locally-stored on the tour device or delivered wirelessly through a network. Infrared can also be used to transmit content, though it is a fairly slow medium so impractical for most museum tours, which will include large size audio if not audio-visual files. The triggers can be ‘active’ or ‘passive’, in other words, they can actively trigger a mobile device whenever it passes within range of the infrared beam, or they can passively wait in an energy conservation mode for a visitor to ‘point and click’ their infrared receptor (PDA or phone, for example) at a trigger to wake it up and cause the content associated with that trigger to download. 

 

For finer, object-by-object triggering, several museums have recently experimented with small-size infrared ‘tags’ that are designed to sit next to exhibits or even be built into exhibit labels without causing too much visual distraction from the objects on display. To date, infrared tag solutions have been trialled in multimedia tours at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, in the UK at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, At-Bristol in Bristol, and the National Space Centre in Leicester, as well as at The National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, The Netherlands and the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, Canada.

   

The content associated with each tag can be updated and managed through the software that comes with the IR tags. Most software today allows the content associated with each tag to be managed through a browser-based application, so it can be controlled remotely and also alert the system administrator if a tag’s batteries are running low. Few systems have been in place long enough to verify the battery life of the tags, but most providers calculate from 2 months (for watch battery-operated models) to 2 years (for AA battery-operated models, depending on usage). Tags can be wired into the mains power to avoid battery problems, and/or multiple tags can be installed next to an exhibit to provide redundancy. 

  

IR tag solutions usually aim at providing at least one tag for each exhibit, so require more triggers than the larger, room-level granularity installations described above. In addition, it can be difficult for visitors to get a sufficiently close and uninterrupted connection to the tag if there is a large group around an exhibit. (Aoki and Woodruff, p. 1-2) These factors naturally increase the overall purchase and maintenance costs of this sort of system. 

  

With object-level IR triggering, the visitor must be in front of an exhibit (or rather, its tag) in order to receive content about it. With a range of 15-100cm (4-40 inches), the infrared tag’s discrete size can be a double-edged sword: objects with small tags can be difficult to locate in a gallery, and visitors have complained that this new technology does not necessarily solve the old problem of finding their way to the objects on the tour in the first place. After their early pilots, at least two museums working with IR decided to move from an object-based tag system to triggering room-level maps and thumbnail menus or a keypad through which the visitor can then manually navigate to the desired object-level content. 

  

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