Last week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its new Islamic wing: Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia. The New York Times featured an interactive guide to the wing, including panoramic views of galleries which may be expanded to full-screen.
Category: Innovative Technology
Inaugurated in Italy, the Virtual Museum of Iraq includes tours of treasures from Baghdad’s National Museum:
Available in Arabic, English and Italian, the Virtual Museum of Iraq offers visitors the opportunity to move through eight virtual galleries and see highlights from the collection from the prehistoric to the Islamic period. Animated videoclips provide details.
Are you teaching or presenting with your iPad 2? Want to avoid e-mailing large PowerPoint or Keynote presentations to yourself? It’s easy to to sync presentations to iPad using iTunes and your Keynote app.
First, connect your iPad to your computer. iTunes should launch automatically (if not, open iTunes from your dock or Applications folder). On the left panel in iTunes, under Devices you should see your iPad. Click to highlight it.
Next, navigate to the menu tab for Apps.
Scroll down to see File Sharing options. On the left you will see any apps that allow file sharing between your computer and iPad.
To sync presentations, select Keynote. At right you will see the list of Keynote Documents that have been synced to your iPad. To start loading presentations (in either PowerPoint or Keynote format), click “Add…” then navigate to wherever you’ve saved the presentations on your computer. Then select Open. The presentation will be added to your list of documents.
After adding your presentations, click Sync at bottom right in iTunes. Your presentations will now be available in your Keynote app on iPad.
Please contact the VRC with any questions!
The Dead Sea Scrolls, so ancient and fragile that direct light cannot shine on them, are now available to search and read online in a project launched today by the Israel Museum and Google Inc.
Tired of lugging your laptop from class to class? Try teaching and presenting with your iPad 2 instead! The iPad 2 can connect to a projector through a VGA adapter, just like your laptop. You can open PowerPoint and Keynote presentations in the Keynote app for iPad. Here’s what you’ll need:
- iPad 2
- Keynote app for iPad ($9.99)
- Apple VGA Adapter for iPad ($29.99)
- PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, emailed to yourself, loaded to Chalk or synced to your iPad using iTunes and Keynote
Once you’ve navigated to your presentation online (or in Keynote), click to open. If loading from the web, click again on “Open in Keynote.” Keep in mind that some formatting may be lost in translation from PowerPoint to Keynote, or from your laptop to your iPad. See this guide from Apple Support on best practices for creating a presentation on a Mac for use on an iPad. Some quick tips:
- The simpler your presentation, the more likely it will open properly on iPad.
- Swipe or tap iPad’s screen to switch slides.
- Presenter notes will show up on iPad, but you must select that option from the menu at upper right.
- Use simple fonts; unrecognizable fonts will automatically be replaced with Helvetica.
- Resize images before inserting them in your presentation; this allows for quicker download.
- Do not plan to transmit audio; currently projection from iPad 2 only works for video.
- The first generation iPad does not support projection or mirroring.
You may also use iPad 2 to present media groups or slide shows in LUNA. LUNA mirrors from iPad 2 seamlessly! Contact the VRC if you’d like a demonstration.
Unfortunately, iPad is not yet fully compatible with ARTstor but you can access some ARTstor functionality on iPad with their mobile app.
PLEASE NOTE: Your iPad displays all passwords character-by-character as you enter them. Right now there is no way to change this option. Wait until you have logged in to Chalk, email, LUNA, or other websites before connecting iPad 2 to the projector.
If you have any questions about teaching with iPad 2, or if you’d like to borrow an iPad 2 and adapter to try out the possibilities, please contact the VRC.
The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek now presents 20 manuscripts from its voluminous Oriental collection in the form of an application for iPads and iPhones. The “Oriental books” are available free of charge in the Apple App Store.
The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek also presents the application “Famous books – Treasures of the Bavarian State Library” for iPads and iPhones, which features 52 highlights of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek’s collections.
The Corpus Vitrearum Deutschland is part of the International Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA), which was founded to share the entire stock of medieval stained glass in museums in Europe, Canada and the United States. The CVMA German Picture Archive includes over 500 high quality photographs of stained glass, available to the public for teaching and research. Detail views of the stained glass include location information plotted on a Google Map. Website and associated search function available in German.
WhatWasThere is a project based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which combines GIS data with historic photographs, including many of architecture. Photographs are linked to their location of origin on maps, allowing visitors to the website (or users of the free mobile app) to take a virtual historic tour through cities and neighborhoods. Users may also contribute their own photographs.
The premise is simple: provide a platform where anyone can easily upload a photograph with two straightforward tags to provide context: Location and Year. If enough people upload enough photographs in enough places, together we will weave together a photographic history of the world (or at least any place covered by Google Maps). So wherever you are in the world, take a moment to upload a photograph and contribute to history!
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Connections invites its diverse staff to offer their personal perspectives on works of art in the Museum’s vast collection. Their voices range from the authoritative to the highly subjective, and touch upon any number of themes and concepts.
Connections is a year-long series comprising of 100 episodes, and inspires fresh ways to approach art. Throughout 2011, please join us on Wednesdays for weekly releases.
Did you know? You can now drag image files from your computer into the Google Image search bar to perform an image-based search. Like Tineye, this ability to do a reverse search for images may help users connect images lacking data with information on the Internet. Google will also tell you the pixel dimensions of your image and link to alternate sizes, if available.