I have been to two museums in the past few days. This blog is to document my experiences in the museums.
Last Friday I went to the American Museum of Math with my class. In my understanding museum is a place where one can “see” all the exhibits and thus one can only experience the exhibits visually. So I had expected the museum to exploit only geometry and topology, which are the parts of math that can be visualized.
As I had expected, most of the displays are related to geometry. But what I hadn’t expected was that much more interactivity was added into the exhibits. For example, on the first floor, one can experience the magic of catenary hisself by riding on a trike with square wheel. The human tree is also an extraordinary example. They used sensors to let viewer to experience the fractals. There also were things other than geometry like the exhibit of binomial probabilities.
This museum did much more than a traditional museum in that it did not only visualize math but also add interactivity in it as well, which most of the museums cannot achieve.
If I were to add some exhibits I would definitely choose to add a display of space-filling curves. It is amazing to see how 1-dimensional curves like Peano Curve and Hilbert Curve can fill a 2-dimensional plane. There are also some other interesting curves such as the Weierstrass which is continuous everywhere but nowhere differentiable.
Yesterday afternoon I went to the American Museum of Natural History with my class. Honestly I was a bit disappointed that there exist no moving dinosaurs and Roosevelt as shown in the film Night at the Museum. But my friend made a good point that I had to wait till the night.
In the Secret World Inside You exhibit I saw many fascinating interactive displays. I like the way they used only projectors and a few touch sensors to make the impression that the whole table is a touch screen. And also the game in which we could use a grip to control the virtual grip on the screen.
My favorite part of the museum is the planetarium show. It used a 180-degree screen to generate 3D effect. It is very exciting to get immersed in the show. Using a huge screen is one way to build Virtual Reality environment. If interactions were to be added in the planetarium, VR games like the ones of Oculus Rift could be a good idea.
If I were to add a section in the museum I would add an interactive exhibition of modern digital technology. Virtual reality and augmented reality were once people’s dreams but now they are coming true. I would want viewers not only to feel the past but also to imagine the future after their journey in this museum.