Museum presents multitouch California land grab exhibit

The new history gallery at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) needed a compelling means of presenting the acquisition and redistribution of land in California through time. While the physical museum artifacts bear compelling witness to specific cultural currents, a dynamic exhibit was needed to show how territorial changes shaped the social and political nature of the state. Using a series of documents from the 18th and 19th centuries, we created a mapping application that documents the history and development of different sites in California.

Presented on a custom rust-colored MT-50 Multitouch Table, the geotagged images are placed on a historic map of California. Each image can be flipped over to reveal more information, as well as scaled, rotated, flicked and dragged. When an image is moved, a thin line “tethers” it to its original location.

To allow visitors to explore the elaborate hand-drawn images in detail, we incorporated a magnifier that can be moved over any image, as well as the basemap. The magnifier, a simple brass square designed to match the gold rush aesthetic, can also be scaled to increase the magnified area. Multiple users can explore the different images on the map, but only one can control the magnifier, encouraging collaboration and connection between visitors using the exhibit.

Both the magnifier and the mapping application were built in Adobe Flash using our GestureWorks software and the Flickr API. The high-resolution images and each image’s metadata are drawn in from Flickr, making it easy for museum staff to add or change points of interest without having to republish the application. Application settings can be easily changed via an external XML file.