YoMu is an utility that helps you to find inspiration in everyday life. That lets you break with daily patterns and gives you an instant culture experience when you’re in the mood for it. YoMu is a mobile and personal museum experience which shows and takes you to hidden stories, images, art and sounds that surround you.
Jacco Ouwerkerk is responsible for interactive concepts and strategy at IN10 and created with Nicole Sanberg, creative director at IN10, this app concept which they also presented at MuseumNext 2012 in Barcelona: Europe’s biggest conference on the digital side of museums, bringing together museum professionals from around the world to share best practice, encourage new thinking and to discuss ‘what next?’
This Slightshare Presentation shows you how YoMu can make a mobile immersive museum experience.
Mike Ellis interviewed Jacco for his Mobile Museum weblog:
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YoMu | June 27, 2012 by Mike Ellis
Please introduce yourself, and tell us the name of your project and what your involvement is with it:
I’m Jacco Ouwerkerk, responsible for interactive concepts and strategy at IN10 Communications, a creative agency that creates interactive brand, museum and city communication. Together with Nicole Sanberg, creative director at IN10, I created the YoMu prototype which we’ve launched at this year’s MuseumNext conference in Barcelona. YoMu was especially made for ‘the unlock immersive data stories’ session in which we wanted to share our experiences with culture projects with Augmented Reality (UAR), image recognition and data stories.
We’re both fascinated by stories that are blurring the line between real and digital and we’re looking for ways to create ‘data stories’ that put the user in the center of the experience. We thought our MuseumNext presentation in Barcelona would be a great opportunity to create something new: A concept for an app that lets you lose sense of space and time. Just like a good exhibition can make you feel as if you are somewhere else, in a different world.
We wanted to create a mobile augmented reality experience that is seamless. That takes the smartphone lens out of the way and let’s you wander through immersive stories. An experience that fits a personal interest and the situation that person is in (mood, time, place, weather, type of transport etc). And all of this together has become YoMu.
What does the project / app do? (also: how do you think people will use it, what is different / special about it / who are the audiences / etc)
YoMu is a concept for a personalized, situational awareness app that allows you to (re)discover the city you live in. YoMu is a mobile and personal museum experience. It will be your guide, tell you hidden stories and show you images, art and sounds that surround you. YoMu is made for cultural curious people. With YoMu it’s easy to experience culture at any moment or place: Just let YoMu write you a personal immersive story that suits the moment.
YoMu lets you unlock and experience personal immersive stories that are hidden under the surface of the city. We want you to lose sense of space and time within your own environment by making the city a big museum where you can wander through. YoMu blurs the lines between real and digital, not only by displaying a digital layer over reality but also by inventing new ways to ‘see’.
YoMu lets you choose between two kind of stories:
- YoMu shows you stories that surround you.
- YoMu takes you on a story trip
YoMu shows you stories that surround you
If you choose for the stories that surround you, YoMu composes a selection of events, art and music that are happening right now. This list fits your interest because you have to connect with your social networks like Facebook or Foursquare. With YoMu you can see immediately what’s happening, what’s the story of the place your in, who’s around, where to eat. YoMu even makes a soundtrack of the area you’re in, based on what’s playing that night in the venues nearby. It makes it easy for locals and tourists to discover where to go. YoMu also gives you notifications when you nearby a spot that you’ll like, you never have to miss out anything when you’re moving through the city.
YoMu takes you on a story trip
With the YoMu story trip you’ll enter an immersive story. Set the available time, mood and transport, and YoMu generates a story that is based on the date, the weather and your personal interests. YoMu uses your Facebook likes to learn that you, for example, like jazz music, photography, markets and combines this with your Foursquare check-ins. We won’t take you to an area where you come too often: We’ll take you to all kinds of unexpected locations where we trigger seamlessly al kinds of content within a story context. We bring you to unique events that take place just on that day. We will bring you in contact with other YoMu users. Within YoMu you’ll find all kinds of tools to see behind reality (AR tool) and record your experience (photos, sounds). During your experience we automatically generate a soundtrack with sounds, music and spoken word. Please watch the video for a demonstration:
YoMu uses ‘storybox software’ to make the personalized stories. We’re curating, combining and filtering several real time data streams with the storybox software to fit a person’s interest and seamlessly unlock that data as personalized stories at a time and place when that person is in the mood for it. This will really augment your reality; being part of an immersive story that is especially written for you. We believe we can build a system that can understand a person that is curious, interested and looking for a culture experience.
How have you implemented it, from a technical perspective – and why?
YoMu is a concept, a prototype that is inspired by a couple of existing technologies that can be used within YoMu. We like Geoloqi that makes it easy to unlock seamlessly all kinds of content with geofencing. We are also very charmed by Roundware, a flexible, distributed framework which collects, stores, organizes and re-presents audio content. And of course we’re using Augmented Reality, object and image recognition techniques that can be embedded within the application and make it possible to skip QR codes. We did some experiments with image recognition for a theatre campaign which brings posters to life (http://youtu.be/ry0JDrx1AtE – in Dutch) which made us very enthusiastic to do more with this kind of Augmented Reality: It’s more stable than AR based on geolocation. For indoor positioning, for example, we could use the Qubulus’ Cloud Positioning API. For the soundtrack we can use the Echonest platform. But the real challenge is to develop the storybox software that combines Facebook social graph and Foursquare check-ins with all kinds of linked open data. We are really inspired by narrative science and the quantified self movement and trying to make this happen within a museum ‘immersive story context’.
How are you marketing the app? How is it doing in terms of downloads / use?
We’re not marketing the app yet, but it will be. We strongly believe in utility marketing, in creating value for people. YoMu is an utility that helps you to find inspiration in everyday life. That let’s you break with daily patterns and gives you an instant culture experience when you’re in the mood for it. We also believe that immersive storytelling is the key to create deep experiences that encourages people to participate. With YoMu we want to create authentic immersive stories that you’ll remember and you’re willing to share. Like a good exhibition that let’s you lose sense of space and time and you want you’re friends and family to know about.
Are you tracking stats? If so, what are these telling you?
Yes. YoMu is all about tracking. These stats tells YoMu what kind of stories you will enjoy, will disrupt or surprise you, that will give you the ‘goosebumbs experience’.
Tell us anything else that you think might be useful to people thinking about building mobile apps / or anything else which we haven’t covered already
YoMu is a concept we’ve presented at MuseumNext 2012 in Barcelona with the goal to inspire people, it’s an open invitation to join us and make it happen. At the moment, we have a lot of enthusiastic reactions and some people have shown interest to help us develop YoMu. With YoMu we want to create collaboration between developers, museums, cities and cultural institutions to tell data stories, to make meaningful cultural experiences outside the museum walls. We hope that more people out there want to inspire people to go outside, with calm technology, to wander in immersive stories that suits your personal situation, the mood your and fits your personal interest.
Please contact us if you want to wander with us.
KRATONKADE 7 / 3024 ES ROTTERDAM / TEL. +31 010 221 46 00
WWW.IN10.NL / YOMU@IN10.NL WWW.YOMU.NL
