Technology

Museopunks Episode 28: Virtually Yours (Part 1)

By Suse Anderson

If there is a hot technology in museums right now, it is virtual reality–a technology sometimes credited as being the “ultimate empathy machine.” But can VR live up to the hype for museums? What happens when VR technologies are used to …
Join me in Detroit to Explore the Future of Immersive Practice

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’ve spent the past week designing some futurist exercises for a convening the Alliance is organizing at Detroit Institute of Arts, September 6-7. My colleagues and I are organizing Immersion in Museums: AR, VR or Just Plain R?, an intense …
Futurist Friday: Redemptive VR

By Elizabeth Merritt

Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination has released the first story in its Crowd Futures project. In this experiment in collaborative storytelling, authors and illustrators will invite members of an …
Net Neutrality Matters to Museums

By Blaire Moskowitz

In future-speak, a “disruptive event” is one that significantly changes the world for good or ill. Evaluating the ripple effects of such events is an important part of strategic foresight. For today’s guest post, I invited Blaire …
Futurist Friday: Argumentative AI

By Elizabeth Merritt

In TrendsWatch 2017 I explored the implications of increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) for society and for museums. Museums are already using AI to converse with visitors, and give voice to works of art. I’ve …
Designing an AI Voice for the Museum

By Elizabeth Merritt

This is the second of two posts exploring IRIS+, an AI chatbot at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In part one, Daniel Morena, founder and creative technologist at of 32Bits, described the program, how it operates, and how …
IRIS+ Part One: Designing + Coding a Museum AI

By Daniel Morena

Museu do Amanhã in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is one of a very small cadre of museums experimenting with chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI). (Well, that seems appropriate. They are the Museum of Tomorrow, after all!) Curator …
The World Doesn’t Need Another Website

By Robert Stein

And so begins perhaps the world’s worst headline for launching a website. But let’s get real, the last thing this world needs is just another website. Recent data shows that the Internet is made up of some 1.8 billion websites and Google …
Futurist Friday: Chatting about Art with IBM Watson

By Elizabeth Merritt

Museum chatbots are a bit of an obsession of mine right now, as is artificial intelligence, so finding a project that combines these two technologies made my week. This story in AdWeek reports that IBM Watson (the program that famously …
Futurist Friday: urban delivery drones

By Elizabeth Merritt

This video from industrial design studio PriestmanGoode shows its vision for a fleet of urban delivery drones. As the designers point out, this solution to the “last mile” of delivery could relieve traffic congestion, and help …