Gadgetory

my background is I studied painting I was about ready to graduate from art school when the web came along and you looked at the wedding like this seems like it might be an end run around the gallery system and it was 20 years too soon and painters still haven't figured it out but I decided that I wanted to understand the web I wanted to learn how it worked so the museum's been closed for the last three years we've done a full historic renovation of the mansion since is Andrew Carnegie full house the collection ranges you know all the way from contemporary movie posters mid-century modernist furniture to all the forks to an enormous collection of wallpapers to textiles contemporary a moment and then we took advantage of the opportunity of the museum being closed and the building being taken down to studs and posts to try and imagine what it means for a museum to be part of the Internet and vice versa so throughout the museum there's a whole layer of interactive experiences and if you think about Smithsonian at large we have 130 million objects we have all the things so how do you get all those to people yeah how do you start to demonstrate to people that and particularly for the Smithsonian because like this is all your stuff like it genuinely it's it's for you and to try and use those interactive tables as a way to to sort of bridge the rest of the collection so we have an enormous wallpaper collection which you know one again people don't have an opportunity to see because there's finite space and - because many of them are small snippets so the place you see that sort of in spades is the immersion room the immersion room allows us to do is to project floor-to-ceiling wallpapers but also it allows people to create their own welcome and then you know with all of these things with the things that you create and then the things that you collect on the tables or throughout the galleries you'll be able to dock your pen and save your creation than the things you've collected to your account on the collections website just vibrate that's it and you know you've got the pen is the pen is both capacitive stylus so it works on the table so I just like all silences do and in the back is an NFC antenna and so and then there's a circuit board with a small microcontroller and storage and all of the labels have a corresponding crosshair on them and there's an NFC tag behind it with the object ID and so you walk up and touch it and it records the object ID and that's it I mean in some ways we've built the world's most complicated physical bookmarking system some lots of people have said to us during during all this process of life why don't you just write an app or use people's phones and the answer is well it's true people use their phones to do this stuff but I think it's only because that's what they've got up there at their disposal no because they actually like it it's just the only thing I think what we would like to be able to do if nothing else is to say to people that yes it's possible all right it's almost 2015 and you know it's kind of amazing what we can do and we're not going anywhere we're the Smithsonian you