PicLens
Posted: March 10, 2008 Filed under: Fun, Images, Technology, Web 2.0 Comments OffHere is a really exciting browser plug-in that makes Flickr and other image sites a lot more fun to view. It could potentially be used for presentations. Pulling images from the hard drive is not officially supported yet, but there is a way to work around this in FireFox. (Thanks to Arno Bosse for introducing me to this plug-in!)
From the PicLens site:
Think beyond the browser
PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. Photos will come to life via a cinematic presentation that goes well beyond the confines of the traditional browser window. With PicLens, browsing and viewing images on the web will never be the same again.
NEW! Immerse yourself in 3D Style.
Our new interactive “3D Wall” lets you effortlessly drag, click, and zoom your way around a wall of pictures for an extraordinary, full-screen viewing experience. Why mundanely flip through online photo galleries or squint at thumbnails from Google Image Search when you can fly through an immersive, full-screen experience instead? Learn more.
Watch the World Speak
Posted: February 27, 2008 Filed under: Images: Photographs, Technology 2 Comments »
David Troy, master of the mashup, has created two very addicting sites–Twittervision and Flickrvision.
In both cases, the mashup is between Twitter/Flickr + Google Maps. Because it is animated, it gives it a feel of immediacy and dynamism.
Ustream
Posted: February 27, 2008 Filed under: Technology Comments Off
I’ve been thinking about video streaming & video hosting recently, and I just happened to come across Ustream today.
Streams are in Flash (FLV), and it has almost all the social aspects of YouTube (rating, comments, and chat [YouTube doesn't have]). It is somewhat disappointing that it doesn’t seem to have an easy way to share the video (like YouTube).
Anyway, it seems like it would be an interesting tool for conferences. In fact, last month the EduCon 2.0 conference used it in conjunction with a wiki.
Check that out here – http://www.ustream.tv/channel/educon-channel-1
Polaroid’s Death
Posted: February 14, 2008 Filed under: Photography, Technology Comments Off
Polaroid will stop making film for Polaroid cameras next year. Just when I was thinking this morning about Charles & Ray Eames’ work for Polaroid.
Maybe there will be a cult following like lomography.
(image credit: sx70manipulator)
Originally seen @ Zandland
ScribeFire
Posted: February 14, 2008 Filed under: Technology Comments Off
Don’t want to go to www.arlisnap.org & log in to post? Well, ScribeFire can solve that if you’re using Firefox.
Scribefire carries your log in info for numerous blogs, and you can start blogging at any site you’d like to. It’s really a great app because it streamlines the blogging process.
For ArLiSNAP, it automatically retrieves the tags we use 
Check it out at http://www.scribefire.com/
Sustainability in the Art Library
Posted: February 14, 2008 Filed under: Sustainability, Technology 2 Comments »
It would be interesting to see university dorms, libraries, etc. use energy usage displays. This one is a prototype that received honorable mention for Core77′s Greener Gadget Contest. It has a really beautiful design – imho. There are others out on the market now. Here’s a list.
Technology and (Virtual) Architecture
Posted: January 24, 2008 Filed under: Technology Comments OffInteresting list of Top Tech Trends compiled by Alexander Cohen (library consultant, space planner) for LITA’s (Library and Information Technology Association) Blog. He also mentions K.G. Schneider’s division of these trends into an “Architecture of Aesthetics” and an “Architecture of Participation”:
http://litablog.org/2008/01/21/top-tech-trends-2/
Windows Surface
Posted: January 10, 2008 Filed under: Technology Comments OffIt would be interesting to see applicatons for academia. For visual resources, it might be interesting when the technology evolves so that the surface can read any image. Using CBIR to pull up related images may give the researcher visual associations he or she might not have thought of.
I can also invision a lot of applications for exhibits (both in musueums & the library)
Fotowoosh
Posted: September 18, 2007 Filed under: Fun, Images, Museums, Technology, [ Creating the ARLIS/NA Student Blog ] 2 Comments »Carnegie Mellon has developed a sophisticated software program that turns a flat photograph into a 3-D explorable environment.
I wonder what the applications would be for architectural renderings, studies of spaces depicted by artists (Van Gogh), etc. It would also be interesting to know whether a computer program could “understand” the space in a Van Gogh in the way a human viewer does.
Check out the video and explanation at http://www.fotowoosh.com
Running Google Earth from PowerPoint
Posted: August 13, 2007 Filed under: Digital Imaging, Museums, Technology 1 Comment »This came up recently on the Visual Resources Association Listserv and may be useful for archaeologists and others who wish to link to a location during a presentation. Some artists now use GPS as part of their work as well.
Running Google Earth from PowerPoint
- Posted by Noel Jenkins on Digital Geography
- January 11, 2006
It’s possible to run a Google Earth file from within PowerPoint. I use Office XP, so the procedure could be different on other versions, but is quite straight forward.
Save a Google Earth .kmz file on your computer and insert it as an object. When the Insert Object dialogue pops up choose Create From File and browse for the selected file. In PowerPoint, right click the new object and choose Action Settings. In the new dialogue, select Object Action and Activate Contents. Finally you might want to improve the visual appeal of the Object, which can be done using Format Object.Thats it. Now you can fly out of PowerPoints!
Art and Second Life: Social and Experiental Opportunities
Posted: July 19, 2007 Filed under: Archival Management, Museums, SecondLife, Technology, Web 2.0, [ Suggestions for Improving this Blog ] Comments Off
So much energy is put into recreating physical spaces and their real-world limitations rather than experimenting with ways that virtual worlds create opportunity to do things that are impossible in real museums. These opportunities can be social–engaging with museum content with other visitors at their computers all over the world–as well as experiential–allowing visitors to jump into, smash, and manipulate content in ways that physics and conservators forbid in real space.
She then outlines two examples of these opportunities – an experiential recreation of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and social art gallery openings.
These are initiatives that information professionals (especially art librarians!) should be involved with!
via Steven M. Cohen’s Library Stuff
The Sistine Chapel Reaches Second Life
Posted: July 3, 2007 Filed under: Art History, Images, Museums, News, Personal Websites, SecondLife, Technology Comments OffSteven J. Taylor, director of academic computing at Vassar College, has recreated the interior of the Sistine Chapel in the virtual world Second Life. On the college’s Second Life island, visitors can step inside a pale-yellow building and view a replica of the frescoes that adorn the 15th-century chapel in Vatican City. They can even fly up to the ceiling to get a close up of the nine stories from the Book of Genesis painted by Michelangelo. The purpose of the project is to help students learn about art and architecture, says Mr. Taylor, who created the interior from photographs. –Andrea Foster
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2186/the-sistine-chapel-reaches-second-life
Do Libraries Innovate: Blogging at ALA
Posted: June 27, 2007 Filed under: ALA, Museums, Professional Associations, Technology 2 Comments »Check out this quasi-transcript (and this one too) of the session “The Ultimate Debate: Do Libraries Innovate?” Topics discussed include why libraries aren’t innovative, the relationship between IT profession and library profession, and how to promote change in an professional organization (ALA)–all very relevant to art librarians/VR curators. ALA conference program description:
The Ultimate Debate: Do Libraries Innovate?
LITA
Track: Transformation & Innovations
Libraries did not invent Google Book Search, Library Think, Facebook, or any other innovation critical to the new information era/knowledge economy. We make use of these inventions. But is that enough? What prevents us from being more inventive? Join four thought-provoking speakers for a debate on these questions and a search for answers.
Speakers: Roy Tennant, California Digital Library; Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix; Joseph Janes, University of Washington; Karen Schneider, Florida State University
We’ve discussed changes we’d like to see in ArLiS/NA, but maybe the question “Do [Art] Libraries innovate?” would be help us get to the root of the issue. I think that innovation can increase the significance, not to mention status, of our profession and professional organization. We are an imaginative, resourceful group of people who value creativity (in visual art, architecture and other fields) — it follows that art librarians would or could be an innovative group of professionals. What do you think?
Hockney vs. iPod
Posted: June 15, 2007 Filed under: Art History, Fun, Museums, News, Personal Websites, Technology, [ Creating the ARLIS/NA Student Blog ] 1 Comment »David Hockney argues that the rise of portable music is causing the demise of visual culture. Are we shuffling our way to an artless society?
Second Life, Museums, and Archaeological Modeling
Posted: June 15, 2007 Filed under: Museums, Personal Websites, SecondLife, Student Research, Technology, [ Suggestions for Improving this Blog ] 1 Comment »Richard Urban blogs at Inherent Vice on his collaborative poster session, “Second Life, Museums, and Archaeological Modeling” for the Digital Humanities Conference.
The researchers have identified the trend of user-created cultural institutions, rather than institution-created cultural sites. Plus, “serious leisure” and Oldenburg’s “third spaces” – what an amazing opportunity to create new spaces for cultural creativity!
Rome Reborn Model Pushes Frontiers of 3-D Simulation
Posted: June 14, 2007 Filed under: Digital Imaging, Technology Comments OffFrom Wired:
Rome was at its peak in the fourth century, with over a million inhabitants. It was the largest metropolis the world had ever seen: Not until Victorian London, 1500 years later, did an urban area surpass Rome’s size. This week, an unusual combination of classicists, engineers and archaeologists unveiled something not even HBO and Hollywood could manage – a complete 3-D model of Rome, circa 320 A.D.
It’s a huge model for a huge city. Running a fly-through, real-time model of the ancient city requires serious processing power. “It’s a big engineering problem to have a big model of something that has to be rendered that fast,” says Bernard Frischer, director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia and the “Rome Reborn” project’s organizer.
To create the digital model, researchers scanned a 3,000 square foot, 1/250 plaster model of the city – the “Plastico di Roma Antica” – which was completed in the 1970s. Because of the model’s intricacy – the Plastico’s Coliseum is only 8 inches tall — Italian engineers used laser radar originally designed to measure precise tolerances on jet parts to scan within a tenth of a millimeter. Each 6-by-6 section contained 60 million data points.
media in transition 5 conference
Posted: May 10, 2007 Filed under: Technology 1 Comment »it was going on while we were in Atlanta, interesting content in audio and podcasts:
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/
Hello from Arlis/ANZ
Posted: May 7, 2007 Filed under: International, Professional Associations, Technology 3 Comments »Hi ArliSNAP and Sara – who left a kind comment on my new blog, which I’m using to communicate with the Australian and New Zealand Arlis group.
Arlis/ANZ is only just beginning to use this technology to help our membership communicate and interact – spread as we are over two countries and many thousands of kilometres with only a relatively small membership in terms of numbers. Your comment about how useful blogging technology has been in the ArliSNAP environment is inspiring, and encouraging to me that this is indeed the way to go.
I’m very happy to have had contact from a sister Society and would welcome visitors to our site and our blog – please leave any comments or suggestions that you think might be useful as we follow your lead in the use of this technology. http://www.arlis.org.au/home.htm
kind regards
Ellen Thompson
President – Arlis/ANZ
