I was reminded looking again at Johnny Lee’s Wiimote hijinx of a drawerful of these handy, little SparkFun 3-axis accelerometers I inherited from a project of yore, and I decided to post this simple project as a quick overview of, um, why they are neato.  You could make this project with a Wiimote, too.  Or the nearby 3-axis accelerometer of your choice.  What’s handy about these little SparkFuns is that they are bluetooth-less, battery-less (and power supply-less–it takes its 5V straight off the serial) and gallery-rugged, and they have a little PIC chip already turning the data into RS-232 for you.

The Project: Turn an LCD monitor (and a SparkFun accelerometer and a PC with the Shockwave application we write) into a ball maze.  (Yes, quite like the toy you could alternatively purchase at a Woolworth’s for less than two American dollars.  It’s supposed to be a quickie intro to tilt and gravity interactivity, smartass.)  Anyway, let’s take a closer look at these parts…

Shockwave?  Not really.  Not necessarily.  I wanted (to the extent it is possible) to try to standardize all the demos on this site so that it doesn’t take 114 weird plug-ins to come here.  Shockwave seemed like a logical choice.  Why?  Well, it’s web-based, so I can run demos live on the site.  It can be object-oriented when that is what you are explaining.  It can be timeline-based when that is what you are explaining.  You can do code examples in lingo so that they make sense to non-coders.  You can do code examples in javascript so that they make sense to everyone else.  And, most relevant to today, it can do true 3D complete with physics.  So it seems like the best single platform for platform-agnostic demos.  I’m going to make my ball maze with Shockwave and the Havok physics engine; you can use whatever 3D development platform you prefer.  (I tend to be a Unity fan, by the way, just as a matter of flag waving.)  You could even do 2D physics in Flash if that’s how you roll.  You’re about to see how easy the SparkFun will make it for you to switch around.  I should add that since mine is Shockwave, I’m also going to use this brilliant SerialXtra by Geoff Smith in order that my Shockwave app can hear the incoming accelerometer junk.

LCD Monitor?  Not really.  Not necessarily.  I wanted something handy you could hold and tilt (and show a ball maze application on.)  Maybe you put an LCD in tiltable casework.  Or just project onto a tiltable surface.  Or make a more Wii-ish handheld controller.  It depends on your actual content.  If you don’t care to be overly literal about this ball maze metaphor (or you still use a CRT) you can just hold the SparkFun in your hand and have, like, a magic wand controlled ball maze.  (Take two dollars to Woolworth’s and ask for one of those, smart guy.)

SparkFun Serial Accelerometer Tri-Axis v5?  Not necessarily.  They’re $89.95 plus shipping.  You could make one for less with the logic/serial chip of your choice (PIC, Atmel, etc.) if you’re that way bent, but unless you’re making 1,000, is it really worth it?  Not to museumssuck.com.  But here’s the magic:  Plug this gizmo into your serial port and what does it do?  It says over and over and over as RS-232 its calculated gravity value as a vector.  (Say what? It takes its static acceleration, which is basically caused by gravity, and its dynamic acceleration, which is caused by someone tipping it or bumping it or waving it, and gives you the combined effect as x, y, and z values.)

What’s so cool about that?  Well, gravity vector (the value the SparkFun is calculating and sending you over and over) is a standard environment variable in any 3D physics engine.  So, in the barest oversimplified terms, all your “application” needs to do for a very realistic, accurate effect is build (or import) a 3D model (you can make a simple ball maze out of primitives: a plane, a sphere, a few boxes for walls… all run-time code, no beforehand 3DS Max), initialize a physics engine, and then keep letting the SparkFun redefine gravity over and over.  Your scene just sits there while gravity goes all weird around it.  Tip the sensor a bit and gravity stops pulling perpendicular to your scene, but instead pulls at at angle that matches the tilt of the SparkFun.  Fasten the SparkFun flat against the LCD monitor that is displaying your scene (with double-sided tape for now’ll do) and gravity pulls on your scene at an angle that matches the tilt of the monitor and therefore of the scene. No software tilting or perspective correction.  Just: ask for tilt, reset gravity, ask for tilt, reset gravity, over, and over.

Next you can add bells and whistles and graphics and scoring and collision animations and such to your heart’s content.  But the tilt mechanism at the heart of it is as simple as that.

Well, almost no code at all except building a 3D scene, applying mesh deforms and physics, writing a serial listener, parsing and converting the serial input (which invariably won’t be in the format your physics engine wants), plus all the generic game scoring and what-not.  So: a lot of code.  But almost no code for the tilt interface part was what I meant.  Which is kind of a neat trick, no?

(I’m trying to keep these tech tips brief and big picture and it seemed astray to turn “$90 accelerometers are neat” into a 3D physics tutorial.  I actually have a Shockwave/Havok/Sparkfun-based tilt interactive running in a museum and, therefore, the code on a file server somewhere.  As usual, if you actually do try any of these projects and get stuck anywhere along the way, just email.)

Er… is this an interactive or a collections item?  Anything that ramshackle under a museum vitrine has to be an artifact, right? (Right?) Let’s hope that just out of frame is a text panel identifying this as the work of, I don’t know, Thomas Edison’s nine-year-old.  Just after losing three fingers in a laboratory mishap.  (Actually, if I recognize this thing, then I know the guy who built it.  And though he may have been a classmate of Thomas Edison’s nine-year-old, he’s actually a really talented guy, who’s taught me a thing or three about building exhibits.)

And my favorite:

Well, I guess we can at least assume they aren’t having layoffs there.  The best compliment I can pay is to say that the scissor lift guys clearly didn’t spend any time rehearsing.  And believe me, that’s a compliment.  I love the part where it looks like the lift operator is double-checking the work order.  Hey, the customer is always right.  There are sillier ways to spend $28/hour.  Not that spring immediately to mind.  Do you guys own three scissor lifts?  Or do you just rent them for recitals?  Either way, surely there is room in the budget for a surprisingly affordable Silicon Valley Desuckification™ analyst.  (Box lunches are free to all workshop attendees.)

Thanks for the self-aware submissions, guys.  Don’t you feel lighter already?  And, um, maybe start tearing down those “Think Outside the Box” motivational posters you see around the office.  Someone there needs the box back.  Who was the famous Broadway choreographer who once said (and I’m paraphrasing) if your dance number has more scissor lifts than spectators, you really should be inside laminating a computer kiosk?  Or words to that effect.

The bar has been set.  Send in yours.  You’ll be cleansed.  It’s like confession.

william@museumssuck.com

(I actually thought the Segway thing was semi-cute-ish, but who am I to interfere with the healing process?)

Thomas Thwaites is making a toaster.  That’s it.  He’s been doing it for months.  Yes, the thing you heat bread with.  If you’re uninspired then you probably don’t yet get what I mean by making a toaster.  Thomas Thwaites is making a toaster from, well, planet earth.  As though he were the sole survivor in an 80’s nuclear apocalypse flick who really, really wanted toast.

He’s mining iron ore for the heating elements and drilling oil for the plastic.  I guess it’s to do with the complete and irreversible disconnect between our individual lives and the things that fill it.  Or whatever.  Most of the reviews I’ve read wax all dystopian-like.  I find myself inspired by what a powerful and complicated machine we, all of us together, are.  A buggy machine to be certain, but an undesigned machine that undeniably works.  The toaster you get for $12 at Target was probably assembled by teenagers in some quite small fraction of an hour.  It also came from iron ore.  Thomas Thwaites’ toaster, if it ever months from now exists, will probably cost several thousand dollars and not be especially good at making toast.  That’s a lot of power coming from… somewhere.  Because it isn’t just that Thomas Thwaites doesn’t know how to make a toaster.  Literally nobody, not a single one of us, even toaster factory employees, really knows how to make a toaster entirely on her own.  I like that somehow.

Like Run Motherfucker Run but in a very different way, I think The Toaster Project is a piece that provokes in a way that doesn’t fit neatly into museum formulas.  And I think I’m inclined to blame museum formulas.  The Toaster Project belongs in somebody’s museum somehow, doesn’t it?

Twice per week I meet another designer/developer/dreamer with an expensive great idea.  And nearly that often I meet a museum without one.  (You guys should hang out more often.)

Struggling brilliants would kill for the cachet of a museum in their corner.  Patrons and philanthropists exist to be handed a proper, capital-D Discovery (or innovation or breakthrough.)  See the brilliance of where that leaves you?  You can have no ideas and no money and still get a seat at the table.  Philanthropy grovelling-wise, an undeniably clever idea plus a museum’s clout is greater than the sum of its parts.  You’ve already got the latter, go in search of the former.  If you can’t find it, you’re in the wrong gig.

You squire two (2) first rate concepts from pipe dream to gallery floor and -poof- you’re a world class museum.  Concepts three and four will be cake.

If you work for a museum, then you almost certainly make less money than your corporate counterparts.  Even the few shameless robber baron-style museum CEOs out there only make, like, four or five hundred k.  That’s hardly a polite Christmas bonus to a proper Wall Street robber baron.

This, needless to say, attracts all sorts of folks for all sorts of reasons.  That’s why museumssuck.com has developed this handy shorthand metric to evaluate and categorize your museum colleagues.

If you’ll permit the oversimplification, in my experience there are essentially three broad genres of reasons that people decide to make less money at a museum.  And so nearly every museum professional can be tidily summarized as a combination of these three traits: noble, lazy, and incompetent.

Now that’s an unfairly hyperbolic shorthand, so I should elaborate on each.

Noble basically covers professionals who are either motivated by their institution’s mission (to, like, stimulate minds and such) or are highly enthusiastic about some museum-specific trade or discipline (such as curation or -I don’t know- taxidermy.)  The first are really aware of what their museum is trying to accomplish and they ponder their role in those terms.  Specifically how, they wonder whilst showering, can we achieve this mission better?  The latter are truly passionate about… taxidermy, say, and want to be really historically great at it and museums are where you do that.  So here they are.  They may or may not give a hoot about mission stuff.  I tally that under Noble for convenience either way.

Lazy?  Let’s face it.  Working in a museum just isn’t as stressful as heart surgery or commodities trading, is it?  More holidays, fewer dress codes.  And some people just aren’t wired to be evaluated in terms of dollars in and dollars out.  Museums are full of cozy refugees with not-especially-nostalgic battle stories about their days at a high-powered Manhattan ad agency.  Or who would frankly prefer to be at a high-powered Manhattan ad agency but will never exert themselves to get there.

Incompetent may be a bit harsh.  I mean it to cover a broad spectrum.  Which isn’t to say there aren’t enough cases in which it applies literally.  Incompetent generally covers people who either haven’t the chops to make it at what they do in the big money real world or they could, but not without taking a huge step down.  The museum COO who’d be lucky to be a middle manager.  The museum middle manager who’d be lucky to be a shift boss.  The museum Senior Executive Vice President of Information Strategies who’d be level three help desk if you left him without a note on AT&T’s doorstep.

Each museum pro is built of ten units which are divided amongst these three categories.  It makes a convenient shorthand for knowing who you are about to collaborate with.  I, for example, am a Noble 3, Lazy 5, Incompetent 2.  See how useful that is?  You can even shorthand it further to refer only to that trait which is relevant.  How was your meeting?  I’m really excited about this project.  That woman is an incompetent: 0. Mind you, that can sound wrong to someone unfamiliar with the scale.

Try it on your colleagues.  Try it on your boss.  Try it on yourself.  (It works, no?)

The title is the only text panel.  B minus maybe for the 2005-y technology.  But it redeems itself with production values.  The first time you speed up and the panic button-less motor-driven conveyor speeds up to meet you is a genuine, primal “Oh sh*t, what now?” moment.  And how many of your exhibits can do that?  Hat tip to any interactive that requires a waiver.  Yeah, the name isn’t why your museum can’t have it.  Watch until the end of the video.

(It is actually an interesting question to me, though.  Run Motherfucker Run was the audience darling of the festival circuit.  Why can’t your museum have it?  I mean that as, you know, a thought experiment.  What, if anything, about it would need to change?  What, if anything, about your museum would need to change?)

I went ahead and booked Museum 4.0™ and Museum 5.0™, so I’m kind of hoping museumssuck.com will be the future of cultural institutions for at least the next two conference cycles.  I’m just going to tidy the CSS while I wait.  I wonder if I should get Google ads.

(It’s actually a really cool resource by a really cool museum.  I mean, let’s not judge people by their ill-conceived domain names, shall we?)

Tweak per week™

If you are an exhibit developer (or give annual performance reviews to one) take 15 minutes every Monday to walk around the museum.  (You really should anyway.)  Use one of your exhibits.  Watch visitors use one of your exhibits.  Pick a single, simple, discreet item that you regret about the design, and… fix it.  One per week.  While you’re listening to hold music.  Simple as that.

Maybe the wording of something is confusing in retrospect.  Maybe the background color is too dark.  Maybe you need a pop-up hint or a quit button you didn’t think to include.  The title graphics were rushed and they’ve always bothered you.  It should show you your time as well as your score.  You probably already have a mental list a mile long.

Do one.  Every week.  Don’t do zero.  Don’t do two.  (Don’t try to fix everything while you are fixing anyway or suddenly it’s an actual capital-P Project that will never make it to the top of your plate.)  That’s 52 worthwhile improvements, per developer, per year.  Cost is negligible and you will see the results.

Just say no!

Ok, it is official as of now: zero point zero exceptions.  Stand with me.  Take the museum developers’ pledge.  There is hereby NO exhibit content that can redeem the computer kiosk.  If your exhibit is a computer in a kiosk, your exhibit sucks.  I don’t care if moving the Happ trackball makes it snow real snow in the gallery; find another interface for it.

The videos for last week’s TED2009 Long Beach are beginning to go up on ted.com.  None of the really museum-y stuff is up yet, so I decided to celebrate the occasion on museumssuck.com by posting Johnny Lee’s Wiimote hacks from last year’s TED2008 down in Monterey.  But go check out them out as they go up.  See if you can sleep after finding out what a homo evolutis is.