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interactive
A British-based company is changing the way museums and art galleries treat their visitors. Ceri Thomas reports.
tate virtual
Andrew Nugée, Chief Executive of Antenna Audio
What’s the best way to tour a museum or art gallery? Easy. Get shown around by an experienced guide who tailors the information he has to offer to match exactly what you need to know.
But that’s never going to hap- pen, right? No major museum in the world could afford to have enough staff for every guest to have a personal tour.
So what’s the next best thing?
How about a personalised automated guide? A wireless machine with a virtually limitless supply of information about the exhibits in question, that can track where you are in the gallery at any given time, provide you
with as little or as much informa- tion as you require, and through interactive features encourage you to think about the exhibits in new and exciting ways?
A few short years ago – when the height of museum and gallery tour technology was a souped-up CD player with a pre- recorded commentary – some- thing like that would have sound- ed like a daydream.
But that’s precisely the BAFTA award-winning solution to the age old-problem of maximising visitor enjoyment that Tate Modern went for.
“What we did at the Tate was different to existing audio tours in a number of important respects,”
explains Andrew Nugée, Chief Executive of Antenna Audio, the company who developed the multimedia tour for the Southbank gallery.
“Firstly it was audio visual – in other words the player [a com- paq iPac PDA] was able to han- dle both audio and audio visual: stills, movies or other elements. The second respect in which it was very different is that it was a client-server environment.
“That means that the content was held on a central server as opposed to being held on each individual device. That also means that the content available to every device was therefore con- strained only by the capacity of
the largest device on the network. And that’s the server which has a capacity of the order of 100Gb.”
So the Tate’s system instantly offered users both a different type of information and much more of it than ever before. But that wasn’t all.
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