“Apps as Tour Guides Through New York Museums, Step by Step - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette” plus 1 more

Apps as Tour Guides Through New York Museums, Step by Step - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Posted: 09 Sep 2010 10:57 PM PDT

The next time you're about to visit a museum, do yourself a favor and drop in on your favorite app store first.

Most institutions have not yet created a mobile app, but as a group, museums are headed in that direction. In the last few months, free apps were released by the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of Natural History, in New York; the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (which also has an Android app).

I recently tested the newest museum apps for New York. While they take distinctly different approaches, they demonstrate the vast potential for technology to help people make the most of a museum visit.

They can also point to a restroom in a hurry.

The Museum of Natural History Explorer, which arrived in July, features a navigation system that, while flawed, helps users find exhibits and museum facilities more easily than with a printed map.

While visiting the museum with my wife and two children, for instance, we knew we couldn't tackle the entire building in a few hours, so we opened the Tours section of the app and chose the Highlights Tour from among the four itineraries listed. (We could have also found specific exhibits in a nicely arranged directory.)

The Highlights Tour includes three options, depending on the number of preferred stops. The real magic of the app begins when it finds the nearest attraction, or plots a course between you and any other exhibit you choose.

Unfortunately, it can be unreliable. In various places in the museum -- near the Giant Sequoia exhibit, to name one -- the device had a hard time finding me.

A spokesman, Lowell Eschen, said the museum was still working out the kinks in its geolocation technology. But even when the app can't spot you, the map offers step-by-step directions to an exhibit from the last place it saw you, so you can find your way easily enough.

The navigation system also points to dining areas, shops, exits and restrooms.

The app is free, but I would have happily paid for the restroom finder when we were near Lucy, the legendary Australopithecus afarensis, when my children heard the call of nature. Rather than wander in urgent circles seeking a museum worker or restroom sign, I tapped two buttons on the iPhone and it led us toward relief.

For a reality check, later the same day we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has no dedicated app. Finding restrooms was no problem, since the Met fairly teems with security guards who can guide visitors. But I would have much preferred a more guided, multidimensional experience to the Met's paper map.

Purists will claim that museums are made for getting lost, and that art is not about efficiency. But by 4 p.m., we had hungry children with sore feet, and we had a train to catch. Only the Temple of Dendur remained on our list. Getting lost in the Dutch Masters would not have enriched anyone.

A few days later I made a solo run to the Museum of Modern Art, and found its new iPhone app helpful in the extreme. (The app's lead developer at MoMA, Spencer Kiser, said the museum hoped to release an Android app by the end of year, and a Web site tailored to other mobile devices like BlackBerrys.)

The MoMA app is fine at guiding visitors around the museum, with an adequate floor map and floor-by-floor exhibit listings, but its real sweet spot is its Modern Voices audio tours.

Instead of standing in line for one of the museum's audio devices, or skipping the audio completely and fighting my way past crowds to read the wall descriptions, I pulled out my iPhone.

I stood before Kara Walker's "Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart," on MoMA's second floor. Thanks to Ms. Walker's description, the experience far surpassed what it would have been with my lazy eye.

The app can also take users on an audio tour of various floors before they even enter the museum, but only about 15 percent of the works have an audio complement, and some of those works cannot be pictured on the app because of copyright limitations. (That was the case with Ms. Walker's work.)

The software includes another appealing feature, in which users can e-mail a snapshot of a particular work, and it will arrive to the recipient with the MoMA brand on the photo. The three photos I sent never arrived, but Mr. Kiser said he had heard no similar complaints.

Aside from museum-specific apps, iPhone users can also get help finding museums and exhibits in New York and Washington with the Museum Guide apps ($3 for New York, free for Washington). The New York Art iPhone app ($1) is a worthy rival.

IPad users can also check out the new Diana Curran app ($5), which is an interactive coffee table book, of sorts, featuring photos taken during Ms. Curran's museum visits.

With the exception of the San Francisco MoMA app, Android users don't have many museum-specific options. They can find nearby museums easily with the free Museum app, which is fast and generally effective, if a bit shallow.

Wolf Mountain Apps, likewise, offers an interactive map with Web links to an institution's Web site, in its free Montreal Museums and Stockholm Museums apps. Androids Future, another developer, presents more in-depth information for cities like Philadelphia and Boston, through its free apps like Museums in Philadelphia.

BlackBerry users can try the Artnear app for similar information. Or, if they happen to be near Gatineau, Quebec, they can download the Canadian Museum of Civilization app, which offers interactive floor maps, a calendar of events and audio tours (also available on Apple devices).

It's about as close as you can get to a combination of the Museum of Natural History and the New York MoMA app. Put another way, BlackBerry owners finally get to test a nearly state-of-the-art app.

They just have to get to Quebec to put it to use.

Quick Calls

Bing fans now have a shortcut on Android phones. The Bing app is free, but so far it's only available on Verizon phones. ... BlackBerry users can reload their Starbucks Card or check their balance while on the road, with the free Starbucks Card Mobile App. The app, which is also available for iPhone and Android devices, will point you to your next cup of java, too. Go to Starbucks.com for the app.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

First published on September 10, 2010 at 2:00 am

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KSU grad's maps guide oil cleanup - Wichita Eagle

Posted: 05 Sep 2010 10:04 PM PDT

BY RICK PLUMLEE

The Wichita Eagle

You wouldn't think bartending and creating maps for the Gulf oil spill have much in common.

But Matthew Hosey of Wichita learned this summer that they did.

Hosey worked part-time as a bartender in Manhattan while finishing his bachelor's degree in geography at Kansas State University before graduating in May.

"There's no such thing as doing one thing at time as a bartender," Hosey said. "You get used to dealing with pressure."

Plenty of pressure, stress and chaos greeted him when he arrived at an oil spill command post in Mobile, Ala., in late June.

"At first, my head was spinning," said Hosey, who grew up in Goddard.

He spent the next six weeks working 12 to 14 hours a day — 14 days on, four days off — for one of the oil recovery companies contracted by British Petroleum to help contain the disaster that erupted with the April 20 explosion of an off-shore drilling rig.

Hosey, 27, used his skills as a geographic information system analyst to collect data, create maps and make daily presentations for operations in Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle.

Much of his information came from satellite images and pictures taken from airplanes and helicopters. More data was picked up from workers rating the heaviness of oil that had washed up on the shoreline.

Hosey pieced it all together to create the maps. And he had to do it often, usually producing a map every 10 minutes.

Right from the start, he was asked to learn 10 maps.

"The guy who trained me was intense," Hosey said. "He didn't sugar-coat anything."

It prepared him well for what he would face.

He made daily updates for 10 to 15 maps — aerial operations, oil observation summaries, boom placements and where oil was being washed up on the shore — plus met map requests from contractors and the U.S. Coast Guard.

"But they didn't like you to call it oil on the maps because you couldn't be sure what it was," Hosey said. "So they wanted us to call it anomalies."

His working environment in a large building with no room dividers was often chaotic, some 650 people all trying to carry out a mixture of duties.

"A thousand different conversations going on at once," Hosey said. "All these people were trying to accomplish something."

To help bring some order, categories of workers wore different colored vests. Hosey was in the planning group, so he wore blue.

He and his co-workers lived in a make-shift tent behind the command building. They were fortified with three meals a day.

Good thing; the work was long, hard and intense. For his final three weeks in Mobile, Hosey worked the night shift from 8 p.m. to about 9 a.m.

One of his least-expected duties came each morning at 6 o'clock sharp. From his very first week on the job, he presented the maps in briefings to the operation's top brass, including executives with BP and the Coast Guard.

"I'm sitting in the front of this room with 50 or 70 people behind me waiting to see the correct visuals on the screen," Hosey said. "That was part of the chaos."

With the capping of the well in mid-July and the cleanup progressing, jobs were phased out — including Hosey's.

But his work was regarded so highly that the Coast Guard has asked him to display his boom retrieval map at a conference next summer in San Diego, he said. He spent his last eight hours on the job creating the map, carefully highlighting the booms against a faded-out background.

Some may wonder why a veteran analyst wasn't chosen to make those morning presentations.

"I don't know," Hosey said.

The obvious answer is that he isn't your usual recent college graduate. Besides being older, he came to the task with hands-on experience in the working world.

A 2002 graduate of Goddard High School, Hosey went to Pratt and Cowley community colleges before taking two years off school to work full time.

His duties ranged from driving a 7UP truck to working as a plumber.

Last summer, Hosey was an intern for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

"That's probably a big reason why I got the job," he said.

But don't discount his passion for geography.

As a first-grader he took home flash cards of the United States. He had them memorized and could write in the names of all the states. He later won a geography bee at his Goddard elementary school.

"I've been obsessed with geography for a long time," Hosey said.

And now he has the satisfaction of using that passion to accomplish something.

"Before I went down there, I was pretty upset at the situation," Hosey said. "I had no idea I would be able to help out.

"Now it will be one of those things to talk about for years."

He's now back looking for a job, but you have to figure this summer's work will open some doors.

"Coming out of college, it was the best job I could ask for," Hosey said.

"I made a lot of contacts. My fourth day down there, I was asked if I would be interested in a full-time job in Anchorage, Alaska.

"I told him I'd think about it. I'd love to go there, but I'm not sure if I want to plant roots there."

But he is sure this summer prepared him to handle pressures that even juggling customers at the bar couldn't.

"I can't see how it couldn't," Hosey said. "I learned and succeeded in that environment."

Reach Rick Plumlee at 316-268-6660 or rplumlee@wichitaeagle.com.

Maps Guides

Friday, September 10, 2010