Smart Exhibits

This Framework for building interactive smart exhibits for exhibitions, that can interact with visitors' smartphones.

It was developed as part of a Workshop at the Imaginary Conference 2016 in Berlin.

Run the Server

To run this application, you need to have npm, node and grunt installed on your machine. First, install all dependencies using

npm install

Now start the server by running

npm start

The default port is :8081, and can be changed by setting the PORT environment variable.

The exhibits now run on /exhibit-name/display and visitors can interact by visiting exhibit-name.

Create new exhibits

Every exhibit corresponds to a sub folder in /exhibit. They each consist of a Jade template, a Less stylesheet and a JS file both for the exhibit and the visitor screens.

[TODO More details on JS API]

Imaginary Workshop Overview

Abstract

While mobile devices are ubiquitous in everyday life, they are rarely utilised in museums and exhibitions, except as guide or to show additional descriptions. In this workshop we want to design exhibits that link with visitors‘ smartphones on a deeper level: utilising their collective computing power, using them to visualise graphs and networks, or to simulate probability experiments.

Combining the expertise of mathematicians, teachers and software developers, we will try to create more interactive, immersive and personal museum experiences.

Participants