I made it back from Europe (Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium). As I am always looking out for multimedia-type experiences, here is my brief multimedia-related trip report:

I visited the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels, Belgium. Along with the entry fee, visitors received a pair of headphones that start playing musical samples when you approach a particular instrument exhibit. Quite nice. But I could not help but wonder how it worked. There were special tiles on the floor with numbers that corresponded to items on a handout that visitors receive. When standing on the tiles, the music certainly plays. And when you look up from the tiles, you see some red lights in the ceiling. I suspect that the looping music samples are somehow transmitted down from the ceiling.

Perhaps my favorite part was the “modern music composition with computers” exhibit, if only for the fact that I am not entirely sure if all of the components shown actually work together:

Next is the SiemensForum in Munich, Germany, a free museum showcasing all things Siemens. One exhibit did realtime 3D modeling on the viewer’s face. It could even take a still shot and email it to a specified address. That last feature did not work as advertised, or so I discovered when I got home.

In the basement of the SiemensForum was a “Multimedia Exhibit” which could be shown in at least English and German. I had the theater all to myself on this rainy Munich weekday. The presentation seemed to be 3 videos shown on 3 separate screens in parallel. The sound was probably some kind of surround sound experience but my recollection is extremely vague as the presentation was so mind-numbingly boring and fluffy.

Next up is the venerable Deutsches Museum, also in Munich. This enormous science museum has an impressive telecom exhibit. Towards the late end of the showcased telecom history are a few computers taking real-time image capture data from a camera and showing it onscreen. The computers were also supposed to be able to stream the video to each other, on request of a demonstration. The video windows mentioned something about Janus95, or so it says in the notes I took. The only reference to that kind of software that I can find is some kind of Ada development environment.

Various tourist exhibits featured these overlong phone-shaped listening devices. These things were free to all visitors at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. Assorted exhibits had numbers that were keyed into the listening device and the listener is treated to a detailed explanation of what he or she is looking at. The Mercedes-Benz tour is available in 8 languages. When you specify your language at the front desk, the attendant snaps a small clip on the bottom of the huge listening device. Either the clip contains all of the audio data (which is entirely possible), or the main unit contains all the different language programs and the clip configures which one is used.