Museum

What do you do when you're the world's largest museum but can display only 2 percent of the 137 million items in your collection (a mere 2.75 million) at any given time? In an effort to get more of their treasures into the public eye, specialists at the Smithsonian Institution's nineteen collective museums and galleries hit upon the solution of digitizing their collection and 3D printing key models and displays suitable for traveling exhibitions. It's a tall order, but one that's sure to give the rapidly blooming business of additive manufacturing a huge boost.  Read More

Let's face it, the audio tours in museums could use a technology upgrade. While listening to the facts and stories behind each exhibit read by a D-list celebrity is still a mainstay of any noteworthy museum or art gallery, the average cell phone today has more features than most of the audio devices visitors are given to carry around. It makes sense then that the Louvre in France, the world's most visited museum, is replacing its usual audio guides with a decidedly 21st-century gadget: the Nintendo 3DS.  Read More

As more and more mainstream car manufacturers join a new wave of electric vehicle development, it looks like we're definitely headed for an electric transport future. While powering a car with an electric motor is not exactly a new innovation, you may be surprised to learn exactly how old the technology is. A team led by Horst Schultz - the director and founder of Germany's Autovision Museum - has spent the last year or so painstakingly recreating the world's first street-ready electric car, designed and created by English scientists William Ayrton and John Perry, and which first hit the streets in 1881.  Read More

The city of Ordos, nestled in the sandy deserts of Inner Mongolia, is home to a dramatic new museum designed by Chinese architectural firm MAD. Drawing on the image of "the ever rising sun on the grassland," the Ordos Museum's polished metal facade rises fluidly over the new city. Ordos - along with its museum - has been in development over the last six years, evolving from a rural culture into a glistening (and strangely underpopulated) vision of the future.  Read More

"You know what your living room needs? A giant animatronic Triceratops." Should an interior designer ever offer you this advice, well, now you know where to find such a beast. Fancy goods-seller Hammacher Schlemmer is now offering a 20 foot (6 meter)-long, 1,345-pound (610 kg) model of everyone's favorite three-horned dinosaur, that moves and growls when human gawkers trigger its motion sensors. Its price tag might scare more people than its fearsome countenance, although at US$350,000, it's probably still cheaper than cloning your own real Triceratops from amber-encased dinosaur-blood-filled mosquitoes.  Read More

Mitsubishi Electric will unveil a huge, 19.7 foot (6 m) wide OLED globe at Tokyo's National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation on June 11. Billed as the world’s first large-scale spherical OLED screen, "Geo-Cosmos" is made up of an aluminum frame covered with 10,362 tiny OLED panels, each measuring 3.7 x 3.7 inches. The sphere will display images of clouds and other views of the Earth coming from a meteorological satellite as it hangs almost 60 feet (18 m) above the museum floor.  Read More

As its name suggests, the new MT55 HD Multitouch Table from Ideum features a 55-inch high definition LCD display which can support multiple simultaneous touch points. Standing at 31 inches tall, the powder coated, aluminum and steel pedestal table has a powerful quad-core processor and NVIDIA graphics running the show, supported by dual hard drives and DDR3 memory. A useful feature for the museum and tradeshow settings that the table is likely to find itself in, is the ability to lock the power switch out of harm's way and keep the ports hidden from view.  Read More

They – whoever “they” are – say that getting there is half the fun. While that might not be true for trips where you spend hours wedged into an airliner seat, it can definitely apply to cross-country road trips. Often, the things seen en route end up being just as fascinating as those that await you at your destination. This fact is not lost on the folks behind the RoadsideAmerica website and books, who have spent the past 25 years collecting and sharing accounts of quirky museums, Big Things, “natural wonders” and other weirdness encountered along the highways and byways of North America. Now, road travelers can be alerted to the locations of these must-sees as they near them, via the RoadsideAmerica.com Attractions and Oddities GPS guide.  Read More

Google has announced a collaboration with 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums that lets people view over 1,000 high res artwork images and 17 "gigapixel" images while taking a virtual stroll through their galleries using “Street View” technology. While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person, the Google Art Project could be the next best thing for those without the time and money to pop on a plane and trade elbows with crowds of tourists looking to catch a glimpse of what some of the best museums have on offer.  Read More