Museums start to get mobile technology

if you decide to visit [the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge] you can grab yourself an ‘eGuide’ – a handheld computer and an earpiece – to carry around the galleries as you go. …there are infrared tags beside the featured exhibits, and you simply point at the tag and click just like you would use a TV remote.

Hurray! And not too long after I suggested

How much better to have a barcode next to each item which you can point your device at and … the audio system, [will be] prompted to play certain parts when a barcode is scanned.

Although I doubt very much whether my blog post actually had anything to do with this 🙂

The judicious use of quoting aside I’m really pleased to see this sort of thing start actually being used. There’s nothing worse than being in a museum and having not the foggiest idea whether you’re looking at a da Vinci or a scrawl on the back of the caretaker’s fag packet.

Published by