museuminabox, somersethouse, v1

Day 5: Box with a brain

Today we’re giving the box a brain.

Can the box know what’s in it? Can it know when you pick something up? Can it tell you what it is?

Adrian has brought his magic box of tricks, and his own (amazing) brain.

Adrian’s Arduino kit

We are using RFID (Radio-frequency identification) tags to identify the different objects.

The RFID stickers were a bit big for most of the objects, so we stuck them on plinths so we could attach the tags.

IMAG5509

Then Adrian did some magic…the RFID reader senses the tag, the Arduino reads the tag and sends it to the Raspberry Pi (some readers can speak directly to Pis, but we didn’t have one like that).

And now when you put the Rosetta Stone on the reader you can hear what it is and a translation of the text.

Now we’re going to record the names and label text for all the objects.

And we’re (well, Adrian is) going to set up an infra-red distance sensor to allow us to play different translations of the Rosetta Stone (a different language plays depending on the distance).

The options are endless…

Could people add something to the object and send it on to someone else?

Can we put different boxes in close proximity and they talk to each other?

Can the box collect stories? or responses to stories? or answer questions?

somersethouse, v1

From Henan to London

museuminabox

Prototyping in Public

Exciting news! Thanks to Cassie Robinson, The Small Museum is about to get its very first public airing as an idea. We’re going to be doing a two-week residency at Somerset House, just next door to Cassie’s Civic Shop in The New Wing. (There was a project called the Civic Bureau in that space, but that project has now ended, so we’re going to pop in for the end bit. Great that the space won’t go to waste!)

CC BY-SA 2.0 by Cary Bass-Deschenes

I’ll be joined by Harriet Maxwell and Tom Flynn for most of our two weeks, and hopefully you. Our simple plan is to take a different tack each day. We’ll have a handy device with us, a new R&D project out of Good, Form & Spectacle called Museum in a Box. It’s a 3D-printed set of 10 objects from The British Museum. We’ll use this box and its contents in the space to explore ideas around content, representation, interaction and visitor participation.

If you’d like to come and visit, do please let us know! We’ll be tweeting from @thesmallmuseum if you’d like to follow along.

We’re jumping in the deep end. Luckily it’s quite a small room.