The BRICKS Pillar deals with the creation of a "living memory", where visitors of cultural exhibitions can create and "exhibit" their personal contributions, by interacting with the cultural objects shown in an exposition or museum.

At the same time the utilisation of the peer to peer BRICKS infrastructure permits users to create, aggregate and disseminate in a real distributed way this living memory, acquired by the users participation and interaction with the Cultural Heritage Objects.

Two different applications have been developed and released so far: Online Exhibition (http://livingmemory.researchstudio.at/) and Story Album (it isn't a web application and so it cannot be accessed online).

Online Exhibitions enables institutions to display cultural objects to a broad public. The Online Exhibition together with the BRICKS infrastructure improves the user experience by allowing Visitors to consult objects and to contribute to exhibitions by annotating objects. Users with specific access rights can create exhibitions and enrich them by uploading additional content. Every registered user has her own Folders where she can collect objects and upload additional content. For each Online Exhibition, various Presentation Templates can be defined which display the underlying content in different ways for specific user types.

The major benefits of using BRICKS as infrastructure for Online Exhibitions are well hidden from the Visitors at the presentation level. BRICKS as foundation of the Living Memory Online Exhibition allows the Visitor to access Content Items distributed over various institutions that are running a BNode. Contributions to the Online Exhibition are stored in BRICKS and therefore accessible from every node in the network. Drawbacks like bad interoperability of proprietary solutions are thus avoided. The tools to create and publish Online Exhibitions are part of BRICKS and available to every institution that runs a BNode. So institutions are able to create Online Exhibitions without buying or creating proprietary tools.

You can access the application from here (http://livingmemory.researchstudio.at/).

A ready to startup Online Exhibition can be found here (http://62.218.44.118:8091/LMv4/exhibitions/SampleExhibition/anonymous/index.jsp)

If you would like to install Living Memory by yourself please download Living Memory from [1] (http://develop.bricksfactory.org/frs/?group_id=15&release_id=48) and read the Install Guide and User Guide

The Annotation Tool (http://saturn.researchstudio.at:8091/LMv4/jsp/annotation.jsp) enables curators as well as visitors to create annotations on content. Annotating content helps to identify parts of content as well as employing a group of interest about the topic.

For more information, please contact Livingmemory Group (mailto:livingmemory@cs.univie.ac.at) or Max Kaiser (mailto:max.kaiser@onb.ac.at).

The Story Album application aims at delivering the Bricks Network services in public spaces through interactive exhibits. The demonstrators use Interactive Tables, that are tangible objects able to make their own surfaces react to users when touched. This happens because dedicated technologies can transform common objects into story telling surfaces. Interactive tables are typically inserted into existing exhibitions as part of interior design of an indoor public space such as a museum or exhibition. Due to its size and original function as a design object, the interactive table allows group interaction stimulating relationships among users. Targeted to any type of visitors, interactions have to be extremely simple with no need for training. Natural interfaces and tangible images have been chosen as user interface standard in order to guarantee accessibility to any age and culture. No keyboard mouse or PC will be seen leaving directly the table surface as unique access door and appearance of system activity.

Two different demonstrators showing BNet functionalities have been developed: The Grabber and the Browser. The former allows a user to take a picture of one or more special objects he/she can bring to the museum, to leave an audio video comment explaining the reason why the objects have a special meaning and eventually to tell a real story behind or around the grabbed objects. The latter delivers Bricks contents in a public space exhibit allowing search and browse of digital contents. Using simple gestures users can operate on the table and manipulate digital contents such as videos and pictures. The interactive application is able to process user interaction and to produce traces of its activity thanks to a new type of metadata implemented (Experience Metadata). During interactive sessions, visitors choose among data, spend time differently while looking at details and possibly grab and carry away part of data browsed in a personal area. The interactive session activity is tracked to extract the overall interest demonstrated by visitors into each single data and detail. All the tracks referring to the same digital content are modelled and merged resulting in a 'map of interest'. Statistically significant details emerge showing up human selection criteria. Moreover, digital object acquire awareness about value of its content from users prospective and will increment this knowledge along the time simply by usage. Each Story Album application is strictly hardware dependent and based on different modules compatible and integrated to the BNet. By means of a full integration among tangible objects, exhibition contents and BRICKS technology, the Story Album application aims at gathering human knowledge, at building up a collective memory repository and at delivering contents to users in a very simple and accessible way. This process has been accomplished taking advantage of the BNet architecture and the technologies.

For more information, please contact Stefano Roveda (mailto:stfstf@infinito.it).