The two latest winners are Richard Milewski's Reprojecting San Jose and Nick Chen's MIDI -- the Golden Age.

Reprojecting San Jose explores the transformations involved in transforming flat photos into a 360 degree panorama. The Second Life prototype allows the viewer's avatar to climb up into a circular display to experience the panorama from the correct point of view. The exhibit also provides the visitor with a kit that includes instructions and a cool panoramic HUD (heads-up display) that makes it possible to take one's own panoramic photos.

Reprojecting San Jose
(click for larger view)

MIDI -- the Golden Age is an exploration of the Music Instrument Digital Interface, a standard that has lasted 25 years and is still going strong. The Second Life prototype consists of five different shapes that represent different instruments and, when touched, change color and play a short sequence of notes. There are also spots that activate several of the instruments at once when touched. In the accompanying text, Nick explains that as a digital interface MIDI can be controlled by many interfaces (including the Wii) besides a keyboard, and can control things besides musical instruments. On the project's Website, Nick includes a video showing how MIDI can sequence and manipulate video clips as well as musical notes.

MIDI -- The Golden Age
(click for larger view)

Both projects are individual efforts by creators who have built their careers at the intersection of the arts, technology and education. This was the first experience of building and scripting in Second Life for both winners, and interestingly both winning exhibits are reworkings of their authors' earlier attempts.

Richard Milewski (Richard Blackhawk in Second Life) is a San Jose-based photographer and technologist. Richard's photography Website is Studio San Jose, where he specializes in panoramic photographs of urban scenes. The former InfoWorld Editor-in-Chief wears many other technology hats as well. He serves as Chief Technology Officer for the Greaves Group, a K-12 educational consultancy, and is principal of RamPage Publishing and AVWX.net, which provide cellphone access to weather maps and data for civilian aviators.

Nick Chen (Nixian Denja in Second Life) is a digital musician who lives in San Francisco. He works at at the Blue Bear School of Music, where he is director of the Studio 101 program, a traveling music outreach program for schools. He also plays with two groups- Not Your Average Superheroes, a live hip hip act and Cloud City Rejects, an electronic rock/house band.

More Judging

There will be another round of judging on Monday, March 31. Actually two rounds, by two different processes. There will be a third round to select exhibits for the Art, Film & Music exhibit opening at The Tech in real life, similar to the previous rounds on March 1 and March 15. Probably only one or two more exhibits will be selected, because our engineers will be hard-pressed to complete even that many exhibits in time for the June 4 opening. The second round of judging on March 31 will be entirely different, determined by jury of a dozen distinguished experts from the worlds of museums, art and technology. The jury will choose exhibits to become part of the permanent collection of the virtual Tech Museum, and will in addition award six special, $1000 prizes. The jury will have a week to deliberate, so these awards will not be announced until the second week of April.

Today we had a small group, in part due to the time change in the US, which was not evident to our friends in the UK (sorry, Lydia!).

We discussed:

• International Museums Day (May 18), with Carla from ICOM
• Anne's gifted free exhibit that changes sound when you move it (in the back corner of the exhibit workshop)
• upcoming judging this weekend.  You must notify us by 4pm today if you want to be judged.  Judging results will be announced on MONDAY.
• Upcoming staff transitions: Nina/Avi will be moving to focus more on the RL exhibition fabrication in April/May, and Rob/Stephe will move into more virtual museum management.  I will start blogging about the RL fabrication (and share some images of the RL exhibits as they are created) in April.
  
• Opportunity to create machinima for the June RL exhibition... we'd like to feature YOU and your work on the walls of the RL gallery in machinima (video) loops.  Please join the machinima project to get involved and start capturing and uploading content.  All content must be received by April 31 to be included, and we are looking for people who want to create footage as well as those who might want to edit it.  I will try to find an expert who can offer a class sometime soon to help people who are new to machinima but want to get involved.
  
• How to promote collaboration and reward participation in ways other than with contest money.  This was a freewheeling conversation, with people commenting that the RL build opportunity is the really compelling draw, but that people like to be compensated for their time.  There were requests to see the workshop become more collaborative in terms of sharing scripts and objects. 
  

The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, launched in December, is Museum Director Peter Friess's grand experiment in open sourcing the museum's content development process. His idea, that is, is to fill the halls of a major museum with exhibits conceived entirely by outsiders, prototyped in Second Life, and licensed under Creative Commons for all to use. Although other museums have tinkered with having visitors participate in the process of developing exhibits, or used Second Life as an alternative presentation medium, none has dared this radical step before.

So far, about three dozen projects have been set up in Second Life (out of 65 on the Website). On Friday, Feb.29, the first four of these were chosen for incorporation into the real museum. They were: Artist-in-Residence: The Painter, Musical Chairs, Wikisonic and Connecting Point: Hole in (Virtual) Space. They represent, respectively, an interactive view of the evolution of a painting over time, a musical carousel where each seat represents different instruments in an orchestra, a 3-D music box where viewers set the "pins" corresponding to the placement of notes on a staff, and a RL-SL portal through which visitors on both sides can collaborate in a variety of games. Images of these exhibits in the Second Life workshop are shown below. Click on an image for a larger view.


Artist-in-Residence was created by Marie Crandell, in real life a systems accountant from Plymouth, England. Musical Chairs was created by Leanne Garvie, a philosophy graduate student and artist from Toronto, Canada. Wikisonic is the brainchild of Jon Brouchoud, an architect and designer from Madison, WI, USA. Connecting Point is the product of a team from the Salford University, in Manchester, U.K. Alan Hook is an artist, inventor and graduate student, and Pete Wardle is a lecturer.

These four projects are every bit as varied as are their authors, but they have certain things in common. Besides scoring well on all the criteria for the exhibit competition, they share the following additional characteristics:
▪ they emphasize interaction with and participation by the viewer,
▪ their exhibit concept was developed first on the Website, and then prototyped in Second Life, and
▪ interestingly enough, their final form in real life will probably be quite different from their present appearance. Their real world instantiation will be a poetic, not a literal, interpretation of their Second Life form. This reflects the fact that real life and Second Life are quite different, particularly with regard to the way visitors can interact with an exhibit (for example, there's not much that avatars can do with their hands in Second Life).

As our Engineering Shop begins the job of interpreting and building these exhibits for our upcoming Art, Film & Music exhibition opening in June, many other promising exhibits are moving forward in Second Life. There will be two more rounds of judging, on March 15 and March 31, for Art, Film and Music, and soon selections for other exhibitions at The Tech and even for other museums.

History will tell whether this open source experiment in museum exhibit development will become commonplace, or even worth repeating. But it is here now, and these exciting exhibits are proof that it works.