MEHopper / New Media Museum
The New Media Museum collects and preserves new media artifacts and history. The museum is especially focused on preserving functional demos of media technologies that did not succeed in the “marketplace,” but insiders and historians tend to agree held unrealized potential. In order to support this goal, the museum maintains a “living archive” of computing hardware, operating systems, utilities and productivity software as well as applications in education, information services, hypermedia and extended reality (XR).
Media Museum’s website …
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The New Media Museum grew out of the NEW Computer Museum (2013-1018).
NEW Computer Museum’s website …
Both the New Media Museum and the New Computer Museum were sponsored and deeply intertwined with Digital Den (2012-2019).
Digital Den’s website …
Read the backstory of how New Media Museum, NEW Computer Museum and Digital Den are related to each other and everything else on this website …
The New Media Museum has a guide to media and computing in Boston.
Media & Perception
Harvard’s Mark I & Hopper
MIT’s Whirlwind & Forrester
Artificial Intelligence & Robots
Logo & LEGO
Games & Immersion
Micro Center & MIT Flea
The New Media Museum is experimenting with creating a virtual museum — the goal of the this is threefold.
First, it is an exercise in envisioning what a “real” museum will look like.
Second, it will stand on its own as a valuable educational experience.
Finally, third, the experiments will determine the best platform for the future.
Here are descriptions of the experiments done so far!
Unity 3D
The New Media Museum’s last predecessor, the NEW Computer Museum, had an virtual museum created with Unity 3D. The obvious problem was that there was no way to publish a version of that on a Web page. It required a download and installation that was, and still is, deemed unacceptable for typical users.
The video below shows a walk-through of that application to give you a sense of what a “Virtual New Media Museum” might look like.
Notice that the posters and almost all of the objects link to content and interactive activities. The “title poster” in each exhibit links to the relevant page on this site, while other posters and objects link elsewhere. There was a high overlap between content in the application and and the content in the “Guide” that was posted on the NEW Computer Museum Web site.
Here are links to the Guide and Gallery pages on this the NEW Computer Muesum Web site.
NEW Computer Museum Guide
Earliest Computers
Pioneers Posters & Videos
“Big Iron”
Supercomputing Clubhouse
Dec & Friends
Micros Zone
Public Lab & Library
Learning & Computing
Game Arcade
Immersive Experiences
SecondLife
There is an extensive version of the New Media Museum in the virtual world SecondLife. Click the images below to explore it.
Toy Worlds
Toy Worlds are fun “3D interfaces” for navigating the Web.
They are literally “toy worlds” because they are dioramas created with dollhouse furniture and other miniature toys that are photographed with a RICOH THETA S 360° Camera. The resulting 360° photos are posted on the Kuula 360° photo sharing service in order to overlay links to YouTube videos and Web pages.
They are also figuratively “toy worlds” in that they are only intended to be prototypes that serve as placeholders for more sophisticated “worlds” made with advanced software such as Unity 3D. The reason those worlds have not been created and posted so far is because there is no way to embed sophisticated 3D worlds directly on Web pages yet.
Here is the New Media Museum Toy World!
Touch the interactive 360° image to explore it. Click on objects to find out about them, and use the menu in the lower left or door knobs to visit other related Toy Worlds that were also created by M. E. Hopper (Worlds, Studio and Cosma).
You can find out about Toy Worlds and their backstory on this post.
Web Worlds
Web Worlds are the newest approach to making virtual museums, and they serve as interfaces to content on the New Media Museum’s Web site. They are scenes created in the virtual world SecondLife and then photographed with the built in 360° image capture function. The resulting 360° photos are posted on the Kuula 360° photo sharing service in order to overlay links to the Web.
New Media Museum Welcome Center
Step in and explore the New Media Museum!
Touch the interactive 360° image to explore it. Click on objects to find out about them.
If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it on Kuula.
Computer Museums Lobby
Here is a companion to the New Media Museum Welcome Center above. It is a virtual field trip to the best (virtual) computer museums in the world!
Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, objects to learn about them, “i”s to learn about the museums, and doors to enter the virtual museums.
If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it on Kuula.
See this post for the backstory and a scavenger hunt!
Here is a fun little annex to the New Media Museum.
Touch the 360° image to begin exploring.
If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it on Kuula.
Learn more about the New Media Museum …
Projects
Virtual Museum
Library
PC 2100
Paths not Taken
Exhibits
New Media Sampler
Children’s Machines
Immersive Interfaces
May the force …
Collections
Media (Transition, Equipment)
Computation (Early, Modern)
Personal (Apple, IBM/Compatibles, Microsoft, Applications, Games)
Education (Knowledge, Teaching, Learning, Bots)
Knowledge Navigation (Trailblazers, Service, Hypermedia, World)
Immersion (Headset, Motion, Mind)
Related Presentations and Exhibits
Hopper, M.E. (2016, November). Is it cool yet? [Exhibit]. VR@MIT Open House, MIT Stratton Student Center, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (2016, October). VR playground [Exhibit]. Gilded Fest: Festival of Music, Technology, and Innovation, Lawn on D, Boston, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (2016, September). Strap on a headset and Jjump into VR! [Exhibit]. A Cross-disciplinary Exploration of the Emerging Worlds of Virtual and Augmented Reality. HubWeek @ Harvard, Alston, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (2016, July). VR rocks! [Exhibit]. Tech in Motion’s Immersive Tech Demos. Fragomen, Boston, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (2016, June). VR blitz [Exhibit]. Edtech Product Showcase at Deshpande Symposium for Higher Ed. Innovation Hub, University of Massachusetts – Lowell, Lowell, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (2014, August). Which way to the holodeck? [Presentation]. Microsoft NERD Center, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (2014, June). Immersive interfaces playground [Exhibit]. Immersion 2014, The Getty and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.
Hopper, M.E. (2014, April). Computer museums: Here and there, now and then [Presentation]. Vintage Computing Festival Southeast 2.0, Roswell, GA.
Hopper, M.E. (2014, April). Digital arts preservation in the Northeast [Panel Discussion]. Art Technology New England (ATNE), Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Boston, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (2014, April). Children’s machines [Exhibit]. Vintage Computer Festival East 9.1, Wall, NJ.
Hopper, M.E. (2014, March). New Media Museum sampler [Exhibit]. Microsoft NERD Center 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (2014, January). Computer Museums: here & there, now & then… [Presentation]. Microsoft NERD Center, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (2013, November). Where’s the immersion? From lab to living room [Presentation]. Boston Tech Breakfast. Microsoft NERD Center, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (2013, October). Wisdom from Athena: A paradigm for precognition [Presentation]. Society of History of Technology. SIGCIS Workshop: Recomputing the History of Information Technology, Portland, ME.
Hopper, M. E. (2008, May). Ok, now what? Ideas from Havok to the holodeck [Presentation]. Sloan-C International Symposium, Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning, Carefree, AZ.
Hopper, M. E. (2005, July). Getting started with robotics: Clubs, competitions and communities [Birds of a Feather Session]. National Educational Computing Conference, Philadelphia, PA.
Hopper, M.E. & LaFountain, D. (2004, June). Robotics in the classroom [Birds of a Feather Session]. National Educational Computing Conference, New Orleans, LA.
Hopper, M. E. (2004, August). Methods for studying educational computing projects: Challenges and opportunities [Presentation]. History of Computers in Education SIG, IFIP World Computer Congress Conference, Toulouse, France.
Hopper, M. E. & Summer, R. B. (2001, February). Where’s the media? Models for creating and distributing teacher and student made digital media [Presentation]. Second Wiring the Classroom Conference. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (2000, January). Knowledge systems 101: From Alexandria to Hitchhiker’s Guide [Short Course]. Independent Activity Period (IAP), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (1998, October). Hypertext in historical context: Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson revisited [Presentation]. Media-in-Transition Project / Communications Forum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M.E. (1997, March). The role of learners in the construction of successful courseware projects in distributed academic computing environments [Round-table Presentation]. Annual Meeting of American Educational Research Association, Advanced Technologies for Learning (SIG-ATL), Chicago, IL.
Hopper, M. E. (1993). Expert’s views about courseware development in advanced computing environments [Abstract]. Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 93 – Conference on Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 607.