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Making Love Lace – a cross device exhibition catalogue & the return of the QR

Estee Wah has been busy bringing Love Lace, our upcoming contemporary art exhibition, online. She’s been wrangling content and ensuring that the website is able to act as a fully fledged (and expanding) catalogue for the show as well as revealing much of the individual artists’ processes in a behind the scenes section.

This exhibition sees the return of QR codes to the Museum (as well as, later, the trial of the tracking pilot).

To solve one of the big problems with QR codes – that people just can’t be bothered downloading a QR code reading application (or firing it up if they do have one), our internal developer Carlos Arroyo has built the exhibition iPhone and Android App with the QR code scanner built in! This means anyone who downloads the exhibition App – itself a full catalogue of the exhibition designed for in-gallery supplementary browsing now also has their QR scanner at their finger tips.

As the QRs are scanned – from within the App – the relevant exhibition object immediately launches in the App. Carlos has also managed to nail down error correction and the scanning is now really good even in low light and on low resolution cameras.

Like for Sydney Design and the Go Play Apps we’re using Flurry to track in-App actions so we can see which objects get scanned and viewed.

(There’s even a mobile website that mimics the App – without the scanner – if you don’t choose to install the App!).

We’ll keep you updated on how it goes and when the automated tracking goes live. Carlos is already working on a v1.1 version of the App to roll out shortly with some new interaction options.

Try out the iOS App in the AppStore. And the Android version of the App is on the Android market also.

6 replies on “Making Love Lace – a cross device exhibition catalogue & the return of the QR”

Excellent work – putting the scanner in to the app is great. In our trial we found that people still don’t get what QR codes are but I’m glad you’re persisting coz I think there’s def something useful in them. There’s a good post on QR codes and musuems here too: http://exposeyourmuseum.com/2011/04/29/destination-qr/

This is great – I second Lynda’s thoughts on the QR code inside the app. Will be interesting to see how visitors go with it – will you do a follow up post later in the year, please? 

We did actually look at styling our QR codes – to have audio tour stop numbers visible in the centre of each code for example.

But for ease and speed of generation of the quantity of codes we needed we ran out of time to automatically generate these. I’ll try to dig up the list of free tools that, with a small bit of programming nouse, can be used to style QRs.

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