Creativity in the Web Lab

A few weeks ago, we had an extra hour in South Kensington , so we popped into the Science Museum, and G noticed a poster for the new Google Chrome WebLab (beta). This post is a basic overview of the lab, however, raises some interesting issues about privacy. I'll cover that aspect in a separate post.

The Web Lab is set up in a section of the basement that used to have an interactive gallery for ages 6+. It was moved up to the top floor about 5 years ago and renamed 'LaunchPad'. So this region of the museum used to be heavily used by school groups, with many interactive stations where kids could cooperate and learn about sound transmission, levers, bridge engineering, waves, light pipes, etc. It was smaller and dingier than the current 'Launch Pad' space, and it was always jam packed and deafening. Now it houses the Google Chrome Web Lab.

The concept for the Web Lab is that there are several interactive stations, and gallery visitors interact with online visitors through the exhibits. There's an overlying invitation to create, to collaborate, to experience the world via the connectivity provided by the web. It's an interesting idea, but isn't that... Facebook? Maker.com? Wikipedia? YouTube? IRC? GitHub? The phenomenon of people interacting over the web seems ubiquitous. Which doesn't mean it isn't a good subject for a museum gallery...

Universal Orchestra xylophone

In the Universal Orchestra experiment, a museum visitor controls the timing and notes hit by the xylophone robot. The tempo and dynamics are automated, so there is a continuous rhythm that doesn't vary a lot. Online visitors and museum visitors simultaneously control the instruments through similar interfaces. Together they create a musical texture. The interface is absolutely brilliant, with dots representing each possible note. I suspect that musicians would find it very limiting, but it was just right for my 9-year old. The user drags red blobs around the screen, placing them on the dots to sound a note. This is fun, but there are only three stations in the Lab, and only one person can interact with each station. Maximum onsite museum users: 3. Visitors from the web... uh, I think it's 3, too, but Web Lab is a Chrome invention.  It doesn't collaborate with Firefox. 

Other interactives:
Sketchbot
These are lovely, but I'm not sure about 'creative' or interactive. The museum visitor stands in front of a webcam. The computer takes a picture, automatically identifies a face, processes the image by rotating, leveling, finding edges and vectorizing to create a rough drawing. The sketchbot draws the vector path in a sandbox which is constantly rotating, swiping out old sketches in the process. Some sketchbots are available over the web. Five or six are in the museum. Creativity? none. Standing in front of a camera is not creative.

Teleporter
Look through the viewer at the 360° webcam installed in a world famous 24hr bakery half a world away. Um. OK. I don't smell the bread, and there isn't even any control of the camera view. Disappointing. Viewing is not interacting. There are two teleporter stations available to museum visitors. One visitor at a time, please.

Data tracker
Search for something on the web, trace back to find the latitude and longitude of where it is actually stored. Creative? Informative, maybe, but a limited search for a specific iota of information is not really creative. When it is the necessary connector in a search to solve a problem, it might be, but not when there is so much external control over the possibilities.

The bottom line:
We spent 30 minutes. The kids had a good time with the touchscreen interface for the online orchestra, which was very well done. The music was pretty good, and we did interact with a couple of people in the museum while doing this. Another mother and child laughing at controlling a snare drum robot. Good.

Creative content? low. 
We spend a lot of time in museums and we occasionally have discussions about what works and what doesn't. Currently, the Web Lab doesn't work very well for the visitor. The wait for the sketchbot processing and drawing meant that there was no way of really 'playing' with it. There was no way to even make a paper sketch of a face. There were no mustaches to wear for your portrait. The kids watched the technology do it's thing.

Scope for interaction: poor. Although this is supposed to be a collaborative environment, the only place where collaboration seemed possible was in the Universal Orchestra. And there it was through the sound scape. The number of people who could interact was limited by the number of instruments available (fewer than 10 in total, and only half that for museum visitors). Stations available for interaction over the web were frequently not being used.

Use of space: bad. The large gallery has a rather small number of interactive stations, and there is little means for interacting with other museum visitors. So this looks like a pretty poor use of museum space, with little educational or creative value. The orchestra is successful because it allows simultaneous interaction, which all participants and listeners can enjoy. Even there, though, the number of visitors who can actually participate is far too low to justify the use of space.

Maybe the Chrome team will be able to learn from the process and make improvements on the beta environment. Right now the most engaging bits are the Universal Orchestra interface and music can the friendly unique ID's, including the nice flowing graphic at the entrance. The rest of the lab is very much beta. 

Update: My son visited again with his scout group over half term break. There was a '30 minute' wait for the web lab. By all reports, G enjoyed demonstrating the sketchbots to his friends. He didn't think that the gallery was particularly crowded when they got in, so I suspect that the numbers are controlled because of the limited number of interaction stations.