Engage: presence and absence of objects

[Dan Sheppard]

Dear Engagers,

As a part of activities here at CARET largely unrelated to
CollectionSpace or Engage, an interesting question came up that fluid
people might be able to help with. As a part of this something else we
stumbled upon the seamless experience ideas in Engage, and realised that
  there was an issue that you must be encountering, and have some
traction with.

In some circumstances digital material will be with the object, and in
some cases without it. In the case that it's without, the material will
probably have to attempt to substitute for the absence of the object in
some way. Whereas in the presence of an object this may serve only as
reference, be clutter or, worst of all, unduely skew the experience of
the object.

The issue came up in a design context: a gallery with an online exhibit
may want, for example, to be led by a visual representation of an object
whether it's designed to substitute, complement, or market the physical
museum experience. In visiting the gallery a kiosk, or handheld device,
may have some means of detecting proximity and providing, for example, a
  biography, soundtrack or shopping experience where some kind of
"substitute" would be cluttering, which is particularly important on
mobile devices. The traditional catalogue of a two part screen, half
image, half metadata is cluttered with the image in the presence of the
object and cluttered with the metadata (in the first instance) in its
absence.

Is this a real seam? Where does the thinking go from here (I've reached
the end of my brain!)? I can think of some responses to this (for
example, on a phone a stateful slidable thing which allows you to wipe
the image or metadata from the screen or have half-and-half.

But the issue seems more pernicious than this to me. If you have an
exhibit of, I dunno, the beauty of capacitors, and you've arranged
capacitors to look sparkly in your museum, then an online exhibit might
want to recreate in its design, visual style, layout, etc, of how
beautiful capacitors can be, but in the presence of them have a very
subdued, minimal modernist grey-on-grey labels on a handheld or kiosk to
avoid detracting from the in-museum capacitor experience.

Do you detect if a device is inside a museum? For example?

I'm sure this is the kind of thing that you can get grants to
pontificate and write theses on: anyone know where we might look?

Dan.