Endowed by the J. Paul Getty Trust established by the
millionaire oilman, The J. Paul Getty Museum started from
his private collection, and was housed for many years in
a Roman-style villa in Malibu, California. Today's Getty
Museum, designed by architect Richard Meier, occupies 750
acres of land in the Santa Monica Mountains foothills. The
sprawling facility is home to countless masterpieces from
European painters and sculptors, illuminated manuscripts,
decorative arts and photographs.
It is part of the Getty Museum’s mission to delight, inspire,
and educate its public through the collection, preservation,
exhibition and interpretation of works of art. To fulfill this
mission, the museum developed the GettyGuide, a multimedia interactive
suite of tools featuring interpretative material on the collection.
The GettyGuide features in depth information about the works
of the Getty collection, the artists, interactive timelines as
well as videos on installations, conservation treatments, art
making techniques and commentary by curators.
Having developed the GettyGuide, the museum needed
a way to share this incredible array of information with
the thousands of patrons who visit the museum each year.
The Getty came to SeePoint with two main objectives.
First, the museum wanted state of the art interactive kiosk
systems with a small footprint that would provide a variety of
easy and unobtrusive installation options. The museum needed
a fully integrated, self-service computer appliance that would
be reliable as well as easy to install, use and maintain. Second,
the Getty needed kiosks that would complement the museum and
its total aesthetic.
“The Museum couldn’t put something that looks like
an arcade game next to a work by a European master,” said
Jonathan Arfin, SeePoint’s president. “So from a
design standpoint, it was extremely gratifying to have been selected
by the Getty for this project.”
One of SeePoint’s standard products, the All in One kiosk,
served as the basis for the GettyGuide stations. SeePoint’s
highly reliable, tightly integrated, small footprint All in
One allowed the museum to deploy the GettyGuide on a hardware
platform that was designed and tested for demanding environments
that require robust computing and graphics capabilities. The
SeePoint product provided a fully integrated solution inside
a durable but visually appealing enclosure which is less than
five inches deep -- a marked departure from other products
on the market which house a personal computer inside a pressed
wood or metal box.
The flexibility and small footprint of the SeePoint system enabled
the museum to perpetuate a unified design for the interactive
systems, even where the museum had different technical, installation
or application requirements for different systems. By having
a special bezel designed by SeePoint for the Getty, the museum
was able to deploy interactive systems with 15 inch LCDs adjacent
to the galleries and with 18 inch LCDs in the GettyGuide room,
while still making all the systems readily identifiable as GettyGuide
stations to museum patrons.
“The Museum was able to install the kiosks in transitory
spaces adjacent to the galleries without requiring a tremendous
amount of cabinetry, which is often needed to hide computer equipment,” said
Erin Coburn, manager of collections information for the Museum. “Robin
Lilien, (our) manager of museum information media system, would
often refer to SeePoint’s kiosks as ‘kiosks on a
stick’ when installation was taking place. It’s a
good analogy for how easy it was to incorporate SeePoint’s
kiosks in transition spaces without being obtrusive or distracting
to the visitor. And yet the clean, elegant design of the kiosks
draws attention to their presence in a positive way.”
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The museum has installed 20 GettyGuide kiosks with 15 inch
touch LCDs in the transitory spaces between galleries and
6 GettyGuide kiosks with 18 inch touch LCDs in a GettyGuide
room. Based on the resounding success of the GettyGuide
stations at the Getty Center, the museum has recently purchased
nine additional interactive systems with SeePoint’s
newest addition to its product line, a 19 inch touch LCD,
for the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa in Malibu
which will open in early 2006 after the completion of a
major renovation and construction project.
Solution based on One kiosks that is a real piece of art, Kiosk
Magazine, Sep/Oct 2005. To read the article, go to www.kioskmarketplace.com.
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